Today I needed to debug a scheduled script and test its behavior when run in the Windows Local System account instead of my regular domain user’s (this was on Windows Server 2016 but should work the same in (much) older versions). I did a bit of research and found a tool from the PsTools suite on sysinternals called PsExec. It is mainly for executing programs on remote machines and gives you the ability to launch interactive command prompts. Good stuff, even though we only need a tiny portion of its capabilities. ...

A few hours ago FileMaker 17 was released, and with it an updated Data API, which is now finally out of trial phase. Depending on your situation and if you have used the Data API in v16, there’s good and bad news. The bad news is that all API paths have been renamed, response formats have changed, authentication works a little different, and a few other little changes here and there. The good news is: if you have been using my python-fmrest wrapper library, little to no adjustments are necessary to make your existing app compatible with FileMaker 17 😎. If you have not used the library but have an app that you need to update, you might still be interested in reading a bit further to get a summary of the changes. ...

Even though launchd has been around for quite some time now, I was still using crontab for scheduling some of my scripts until recently. Since launchd LaunchAgents can do much more and don’t expect your computer to be running at all times, it’s time to start using them more 😎. Let’s see how we can easily set up a LaunchAgent to run a Python script for the current user in regular intervals: ...

When trying to read an Excel file into a Pandas DataFrame gives you the following error, the issue might be that you are dealing with a password protected Excel file. pd.read_excel(PATH) [...] XLRDError: Can't find workbook in OLE2 compound document There seems to be no way of reading password protected files with xlrd. xlwings for the rescue Fortunately, there is xlwings, which lets you interact with the Excel application itself (via pywin32 or appscript). ...

During the weekend, I discovered Bokeh, a Python visualization library for the web. The samples looked nice, so I played around a bit, mostly following the accessible Quick Start guide. Eventually, I decided to build a small dashboard with Bokeh for an existing Flask application and wanted the plots to automatically fetch data updates using AJAX requests. This meant fiddling around a bit and reading more documentation. If you plan on doing something similar, the following write-up hopefully saves you some time and pitfalls. ...