Dammit Jim!

I was curious how I spend my time and wanted something simple to log which window was active on my computer. I couldn’t see anything that did this easily on the internet, although there is a (more sophisticated/complicated) browsing history tracker, and I needed to relax for an hour or two so I thought I’d give it a shot in Python and see what came out. After looking at the flashing taskbar icon tutorial, how to get the currently active window, how to detect if Windows is idle and how to get rid of the console window, I could finally start programming. I really don’t know how people programmed before Google.

Python sure is handy. I just found out that if you make a program that uses wxPython or something to generate windows and don’t want the big (somewhat ugly) black console window, all you have to do is change the program name from program.py to program.pyw or run pythonw.exe instead of python.exe. Pretty obvious now but took me a few minutes to come up with the right google. Now I just wish it wasn’t using 16 megs of RAM for a 30 line program…