Tkinter & socket question

[Def P]

Hello,

I am writing a little chat program in Python and Tkinter. I can't figure out
two things though:

1) When there's no connection, I don't want people to use the Entry on the
window (which is used to enter text and send it after pressing Enter). So, I
want to disable it. I used entry.state = DISABLED, but I still can enter text.
Is this normal? Is there a way to make it "unusable"?

2) I need to poll the connection periodically, say, every second. This would
not have been a problem in console mode... I don't know how to do this in a
Tkinter environment though. So, how can I do something every second (or every
n milliseconds, or whatever the time span may be)? Are threads the way to go?
I haven't used them before.

Thanks,
Def P


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