Programming icons

"Packaging is the product itselft." This is the matra for most marketing folks. This is no different in designing user interfaces for customer use. Selecting a nice set of icons then becomes a serious issue if the product is for general public consumption. This complicates even more for small shops or one man team designing software solutions. Thanks to the current revolution in software development... open source, creative commons and the likes. Listed below are some icon set that are either LGPL, CCA or etc. Ximian icon sets License : LGPL The icons are being used in OpenOffice and Ximian Desktop 2 Silk Icon set License : Create Commons Attribution 2.5 License “Silk” is a smooth, free icon set, containing over 700 16-by-16 pixel icons in strokably-soft PNG format. Containing a large variety of icons, you're sure to find something that tickles your fancy. And all for a low low price of $0.00. You can't say fairer than that. ~ts~

List Microsoft Windows products installed in a system

I develop a short python script to display Microsft Corporation software that is installed on a system. This script can be modifed easily to check for all installed OS hotfixes if need be. See below for the script:
<---code-----
import _winreg
import sys

hkcu = _winreg.ConnectRegistry(None,_winreg.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE)m_key = "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall"m_UnInstall = _winreg.OpenKey( hkcu, r"SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall")
_index = 0while True:    try:        m_subkey = _winreg.EnumKey(m_UnInstall,_index)        m_newkey = m_key + "\\" + m_subkey
        m_RegistryKey = _winreg.OpenKey( hkcu, m_newkey )        try:            if _winreg.QueryValueEx(m_RegistryKey, r"Publisher")[0] == r"Microsoft Corporation":                
                print _winreg.QueryValueEx(m_RegistryKey, r"DisplayName")[0]                _winreg.CloseKey(m_RegistryKey)        except:#            print "Unexpected error:", sys.exc_info()[0]            pass
#        print "current key %s" % m_newkey        _index = _index + 1        
    except EnvironmentError:#        print "Nothing to retrieve"         break_winreg.CloseKey(m_UnInstall)_winreg.CloseKey(hkcu)
<---code-----
Or download it from here.
~ts~

Enable command line completion using TAB char for Windows 2000 Professional

Command line completion is almost always expected of terminals on Linux systems. On Windows 2000 Professional, command line completion can be enabled by changing the following registry entry: KEY = HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor PARAMETER = CompletionChar Change the value from 0 to 9(TAB in HEX).

Python 2.5 install issue on some Windows XP machines

I have installed Python 2.5 from ActiveState on two machines now and each one was working pretty nice. But on one of my machines PythonWin refused to load, see below for the message:

---------------------------
Python for Win32
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The application can not locate win32ui.pyd (or Python) (126)
The specified module could not be found.

---------------------------
OK   

Searching in ASPN network I found out that this is an open issue, see 68141. The good thing with this bug is that the workaround is quite simple if you have a working installation. Just copy pythoncom25.dll and pywintypes25.dll into c:\windows\system32 of the machine that PythonWin does not work. What if you don't have a working machine? Well, low and behold, I have it for you. Download it here. I'll be more than thankful if anyone can report to me that this issue is already fixed so that I can update this blog. Another work-around is to install pythonwin on top of currently installed version from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=78018. Select pywin32-210.win32-py2.5.exe and download. ~ts~