After the technical difficulties that ended the Lightning talks this morning, Van Lindberg got up and stalled for time while they got it fixed so he could introduce the first plenary. He did a really good job and let us know that this PyCon had set two records: First, it has the largest attendance ever […]
On Saturday morning, PyCon hosted some Lightning Talks for about half an hour. Here are the topics and authors (when I caught their names): Joseph Tate – A web anti-pattern Securing Python Package Management – Justin Samuel The State of Crypto in Python – Geremy Condra Haystack for Django, has custom search, includes tests and
PyCon 2010: Saturday – Morning Lightning Talks Read More »
The third session only was only two talks long. I decided to check out Ecommerce in Python: Introduction to Satchmo and GetPaid (#144) by Christopher Johnson and Chris Moffett. My primary reason for attending this talk is because I’ve thought that opening an online store sounds really interesting and I might be able to use
PyCon 2010: Friday – Session 3 Read More »
For Session 2, I decided to volunteer as a Session Chair, which means that I basically would introduce the speakers and try to keep them from talking too long. My first speaker was Tarek Ziade and he spoke on The State of Packaging. He spoke mostly about distutils, setuptools (easy_install) and pip during the first
PyCon 2010: Friday – Session 2 Read More »
I went to three sessions in the morning: Building Leafy Chat, A Short Pinax Tutorial and Import This, that and the other thing: custom importers. If you’re interested, you can read on to see what I thought.
PyCon 2010: Friday (2010/02/19) – Session One Read More »
It’s the first official day of PyCon: Friday, February 19th, 2010. In my experience, PyCon plenaries can either be really interesting or extremely boring. I’ve rarely seen one that was in the middle. The chairman of PyCon is Van Lindberg (The Python Software Foundation’s lawyer, I think). Steve Holden was the first plenary speaker.
PyCon 2010: Friday Plenaries Read More »
I was contacted this week to review a new book from Packt Publishing entitled “Python Testing: Beginner’s Guide” by Daniel Arbuckle (no relation to Garfield’s master as far as I can tell). I haven’t received the book yet, but you can read about it on their website. I also found the book on Amazon. Alas,
Book Preview: Python Testing – Beginner’s Guide Read More »
I do a fair amount of technical support in addition to my software development. In our small shop, we get to troubleshoot anything that is related to technology, from networks to software to printers. I think one of the most annoying aspects is trying to get printers to work the way the user wants. Another
Python, Windows and Printers Read More »
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about some scripts we use at work for creating shortcuts to various programs in Windows. Well, we also push out updates to some programs which change the paths of the programs and then we need to change the user’s shortcuts to match. Unfortunately, some user’s will change the name
Using Python to Edit Bad Shortcuts Read More »
Almost four years ago, I was tasked with converting a Kixtart script to Python. This particular script was used to lock down Windows XP machines so they could be used as kiosks. Obviously, you don’t need Python to do this. Any programming language that can access the Windows Registry will be able to do this
Lock Down Windows with Python Read More »
Last month I wrote a post about getting Windows system information and I mentioned in one of my comments that there was another script that did some of this as well as other stuff, but I couldn’t find it. Well, today I went digging for it and found the script I wanted. So we’re going
More Windows System Information with Python Read More »
In the first part of this series, we went over what some might call the “SQL Expression” method of using SqlAlchemy to interact with your database. The theory behind this is that we should learn the less abstract way of doing things before we get to the higher level (and more abstract) methods. This is
Another Step-by-Step SqlAlchemy Tutorial (part 2 of 2) Read More »
A long time ago (circa 2007 if Google serves me right), there was a Python programmer named Robin Munn who wrote a really nice tutorial on SqlAlchemy. It was originally based on the 0.1 release, but updated for the newer 0.2. Then, Mr. Munn just disappeared and the tutorial was never updated. I having been kicking around the idea of releasing my own version of this tutorial for quite some time and finally decided to just do it. I hope you will find this article helpful as I found the original to be.
Another Step-by-Step SqlAlchemy Tutorial (part 1 of 2) Read More »
Another script I had to come up with for my employer dealt with getting various bits and pieces of information about each of our user’s physical machines. We wanted to keep track of the CPU speed, hard drive sizes and the amount of RAM they had (among other things) so we would know when it
Getting Windows System Information with Python Read More »
At my job, I do a fair amount of system administration scripting in Python. For example, almost all the login scripts are written in Python (with some of them ported from Kixtart). Over the years, I’ve been tasked with creating shortcuts to new applications that need to be placed on the user’s desktop or in
Using Python to Create Shortcuts Read More »