The Mouse Vs. The Python

Python is pretty easy to install on Windows, but sometimes you need to do a few extra tweaks to really get the most our your development environment. In this article, we will try to cover all the common things you might want to do or install to get an ideal Python Windows development workspace set up. Some of you might think that all you need to do is install Python and you’re done, but if you’re going to do Windows development, then you’ll need a few other packages to make it nicer. (more…)

TurboGears is one of several web frameworks for Python that are available. The most popular by far is Django. Where I work, we chose TurboGears because of its integration with SQLAlchemy which supports composite keys. At that time, Django did not support that feature and I am not sure if it does yet. Anyway, I develop almost exclusively on a Windows box and have found the TurboGears’ documentation on the subject a little confusing. So here’s how I do it.

Note: We’ll be using TurboGears 2.1 in this tutorial (more…)

Last week, there was an interesting thread on the PyWin32 mailing list about how to read Microsoft Access databases with Python without having Access actually installed. Vernon Cole had the solution, but I noticed that Google doesn’t seem to index the PyWin32 list very well, so I decided to write about it here. (more…)

A couple of months ago at work, we received a report that a file was locked. The dialog that appeared showed the initials of a user who wasn’t even working for us any more. Thus we discovered an annoying bug that can crop up with Office. Basically, a user is asked by Word or Excel to input their name and initials during the first run of that respective application and it will keep that data no matter who logs into the machine later on. This can lead to some serious confusion when we get error messages of this sort. Anyway, let’s take a quick look at how to get this done. (more…)

Update (10/12/2010) – One of my alert readers told me that SqlAlchemy 0.6.x currently does NOT support the Access dialect. Read here for more info.

A year or two ago, I was asked to transfer some data from some old Microsoft Access files to our Microsoft SQL Server. Since I enjoy using SqlAlchemy, I decided to see if it supported Access. The documentation at the time was pretty unhelpful in this regard, but it did seem to be possible and I found one thread about it on SqlAlchemy’s Google group. (more…)

The other day, I was tasked with finding a way to get a list of all running processes on a Windows XP virtual machine. I was also supposed to include information about how much CPU and memory each process used. Fortunately, this didn’t have to be a remote script, but one that could be run on the client. After a fair bit of Googling here and there, I finally found a solution. In this article, we’ll look at some of the rejects as well as the eventual solution, which happens to work cross-platform. (more…)

After about a year or so at my current job, as we were still working on upgrading the last few Windows 98 machines to Windows XP, we had a need to check which machines on our network were getting low on disk space. The issue was cropping up because we had Windows XP loaded on several machines that had 10 GB hard drives and a few with 20 GB and one or two with just 4 GB. Anyway, after some digging online, I discovered that the PyWin32 package could accomplish what I needed. (more…)

The bbfreeze package also allows us to create binaries, but only on Linux and Windows. It’s just an easy_install away, so if you plan on following along with the examples in the article, you should go get it. The bbfreeze package includes egg support, so it can include egg dependencies in your binary, unlike py2exe. You can also freeze multiple scripts at once, include the Python interpreter and more. According to bbfreeze’s PyPI entry, it’s only been tested with Python 2.4-2.5, so keep that in mind. However, I was able to use it with Python 2.6 with no obvious problems. (more…)

In our previous article on building binaries, we learned a little about py2exe. This time around, we will be focusing our collective attention on the ins and outs of PyInstaller. We’ll use the same lame wxPython script from the last article for one of our examples, but we’ll also try a normal console script to see what the differences are, if any. In case you didn’t know, PyInstaller works on Linux, Windows and Mac (experimental) and works with Python 1.5-2.6 (except on Windows, where there’s a caveat for 2.6 – see below). PyInstaller supports code-signing (Windows), eggs, hidden imports, single executable, single directory, and lots more! (more…)

I received a request to create an article on how to use py2exe and wxPython to create an executable. I d, ecided to do a series on packaging instead. It is my intention to go over the major Windows binary building utilities and show you, dear reader, how to use them to create a binary that you can distribute. Once those articles are done, I’ll show how to use Inno and NSIS. To kick things off, we’ll go over how to use py2exe, probably the most popular of the Windows executable packages. (more…)