Mike, Author at Mouse Vs Python

Another Step-by-Step SqlAlchemy Tutorial (part 1 of 2)

22 Comments / Cross-Platform, Python, SqlAlchemy / Mike / February 3, 2010 / Python, SqlAlchemy

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.

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Getting Windows System Information with Python

4 Comments / Python, Windows / Mike / January 27, 2010 / Python, Windows

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

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Using Python to Create Shortcuts

11 Comments / Python, Windows / Mike / January 23, 2010

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

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Generating a Dialog from a File

8 Comments / Cross-Platform, Python, wxPython / Mike / January 20, 2010 / ConfigObj, Python, wxPython

A few days ago, I wrote an article about using ConfigObj with wxPython. The first question I was asked about the article regarded using a configuration file to generate the dialog. I thought this was an interesting idea, so I took a stab at implementing that functionality. Personally I think it would be probably be

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ConfigObj + wxPython = Geek Happiness

2 Comments / Cross-Platform, Python, wxPython / Mike / January 17, 2010 / ConfigObj, wxPython

I recently starting using Michael Foord’s ConfigObj for one of our internal wxPython applications at work. When I wrote my other ConfigObj tutorial, I wanted to show you how I was using ConfigObj with my preferences dialog, but I didn’t want all my posts to include wx. In this article, I’ll just show you how

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PyCon 2010 is Coming

7 Comments / PyCon / Mike / January 14, 2010 / PyCon

PyCon USA 2010 will be held in Atlanta, Georgia this year, from February 19-21. There are also tutorial and sprint days that precede and follow the conference. Last year, I was told that my employer wouldn’t pay my way next time. So this year I had to decide if I would go all on my

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Shortening URLS with wxPython

3 Comments / Cross-Platform, Python, wxPython / Mike / December 24, 2009 / Python, Tutorial, wxPython

During the summer, I stumbled upon an article on Ars Technica about using PyGTK to create a URL shortener. I thought that was pretty interesting, but I don’t use PyGTK. So at that point, I decided to write my own using wxPython and use the article’s code to do the shortening. I hacked together something

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wxPython: Using ObjectListView instead of a ListCtrl

4 Comments / Python, wxPython / Mike / December 23, 2009

The wxPython ListCtrl is a very handy widget. Unfortunately, it can be a pain to use as well. This discovery caused Phillip Piper, missionary to Mozambique, to write ObjectListView, a wrapper for the wx.ListCtrl. ObjectListView actually adds functionality because it uses objects to create its rows and thus, it makes gettings information from multiple columns

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The “Book” Controls of wxPython (Part 1 of 2)

16 Comments / Python, wxPython / Mike / December 3, 2009 / notebooks, wxPython

If you’re new to GUI programming (and wxPython in particular), you may not know what a “book” control is. It may be that other languages call this control something different too. In wxPython, a book control allows the user to switch between various panels. The most common examples are browsers and system option dialogs with

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wxPython: Refactoring Your Program

13 Comments / Cross-Platform, Python, wxPython / Mike / November 11, 2009

There is a lot of bad code in the world. My objective in this article is to help wxPython programmers learn how to make their applications easier to maintain and modify. It should be noted that what is in this article is not necessarily the so-called “best” way to refactor a program; instead the following

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Pyowa – October 2009 Meeting Wrap-up

2 Comments / Pyowa, Python / Mike / October 2, 2009

We had out October Pyowa meeting last night and I thought it was very interesting. We had an executive from a local technology company called Priority5 come out and he told us how he got started with Python and how they use it at his current employer’s. We also had a talk on Optparse, ConfigParser

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wxPython: Resetting the Background Color

4 Comments / Cross-Platform, Python, wxPython / Mike / September 3, 2009

The last couple weeks, I’ve seen multiple people ask about resetting the color of a widget back to its original “default” color. There was at least one guy on the wxPython mailing list and another on their IRC channel that requested info on this topic. When I first looked up this issue, it was for

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wxPython: Catching Key and Char Events

1 Comment / Cross-Platform, Python, wxPython / Mike / August 29, 2009

In this post, I’ll detail how to catch specific key presses and why this can be useful. This is another in my series of “requested” tutorials. There really isn’t much to catching key presses, but it can be a little confusing when one widget behaves slightly differently from another. The really complicated stuff comes in

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wxPython: Learning to Focus

10 Comments / Cross-Platform, Python, wxPython / Mike / August 27, 2009

I had a request this week to write up a quick tutorial on focus events in wxPython. Fortunately, there’s not a lot of material to cover on this subject, so this should be a pretty quick and dirty little post. I’ll see you after the jump!

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wxPython: Using wx.Timers

7 Comments / Cross-Platform, Python, wxPython / Mike / August 25, 2009

This past couple of weeks, I’ve seen multiple people ask about timers and how they work either on the wxPython mailing list or on their IRC channel. So I decided it was high time I wrote a couple of example scripts to show how they’re used. I will cover two examples, the first of which

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