Kudos have to go to Joe Ehrensberger for translating “Snake Wrangling for Kids” into German.

The completed edition of Schlangengerangel für Kinder was just released today. PDFs for Windows, Linux and Mac versions can be downloaded from the Google Code site (this link will take you directly to the downloads).

Au ja!

This is cool – SWFK was the top voted comment (option?) on a recent stack overflow discussion about programming for 11 year olds:
stackoverflow.com/…/which-programming-language-is-manageable-by-an-11-year-old-kid

There’s finally a German version in progress:
code.google.com/p/swfk-de/

Here’s a news group discussion about SWFK being used (at least in part) for a course on teaching Python:
archives.seul.org/schoolforge/…/msg00041.html

And finally, the book also made the list of beginner’s tools on the sugarlabs wiki:
wiki.sugarlabs.org/…/Resources

Chuffed.

I was updating the SWFK project page with the total number of downloads (since I last updated it in March), and discovered that I’ve miscalculated the figure. I use awstats for my site, and usually just go through all the swfk-*.zip links for each month, using a calculator, to work out the sub-total, then add the downloads from the Google Code project page. However, this time I used a spreadsheet, and it appears as if I’ve previously missed a few thousand downloads. So while I thought the the grand total was around 16K, it looks like it’s actually in the region of 19K. Which is something like 18-20GB worth of data — a reasonably impressive figure, when I think about it.

Perhaps I’ll throw myself a party when I hit 20K…

…or “Snake Wrangling for Kids in Spanish”, has just been released. Well done to José for getting it finished.

Download from the Google project page: http://code.google.com/p/swfk-es

Muy bueno! (I hope that’s right… )

That’s Snake Wrangling for Kids, in French for the linguistically challenged.

Congratulations to Michel for releasing the first non-English edition of SWFK. Awesome effort!
See the project downloads for version 0.0.1.

Spanish edition soon to follow (at least judging from the commits)…

“Snake Wrangling for Kids” is now hosted at Google Code. This includes the Mercurial repository, with all image files (including the cover, which I felt was too large for my repo, but should be fine supported by Google’s BigTable… ).

Check out the new project page here: http://code.google.com/p/swfk.

The distribution file for the Python2 version of stomp.py has been fixed. I had a minor problem in my setup which meant only half the files were included — not particularly useful to anyone.

I’ve also updated the Python3 version to include optparse for handling arguments, the facility to specify a file of commands as both a runtime argument and from within the stomp.py console.

For example, you can now do something like:

python stomp/cli.py --file mycommands.txt

Which I think is pretty useful, at least. Feedback welcomed.

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A Python3-compatible release of stomp.py is now available, along with doxygen-generated docs (finally). I’ve done a reasonable amount of tidying up in the Py3k version, along with adding support for sending files from the command-line interface. There have been a few additional bug fixes in both Python2 and Python3 versions.

See the project page for more information. Any problems, as usual either email or (better yet) post in the discussion forum.

My brilliant (well, in my opinion) idea for a Python templating engine, performed somewhat less than brilliantly compared to the competition.

Tenjin, marketed as the fastest template engine in the world, blitzes through 10,000 pages in 5.61 seconds on a Mac Intel CoreDuo 1.83GHz (according to their website). The same benchmark runs on my Mac in about 4.98 seconds, so adjusting the other Python templating engines listed on Tenjin’s website by the same ~11% we get approximate performance of:

The original version of Proton, for the same benchmark, came in at a less than impressive 400+ seconds. A bit of tidying up reduced the current version to a more respectable (but still abysmal) 280 seconds, putting it between Genshi and Kid. A couple of other ideas produced even worse performance (more than 800 seconds), but in the meantime, lxml released a Python3 compatible version. A minor rewrite later, and the lxml version of Proton now runs the benchmark in a far more acceptable 78 seconds. Putting it between Templetor and Genshi. Still not even in the top three, but it has the advantage (again in my opinion) of being an entirely more elegant solution, and is now within throwing distance of both Templetor and Django.

Result!

Get the latest version of Proton from the Google code project. You will probably need to download and install the source dist of lxml to take advantage of the performance improvement.

I’ve refactored stomp.py for the version 2.0 release (yes, I realise I’ve missed version 1.9, but who’s going to quibble over a minor…?).

As well as refactoring, I’ve added help to the command-line client, a facility for recording stats (messages sent/received), and the start of some unit tests.

The refactored version 2 is available in branch “experimental-r2″. Run hg update -C experimental-r2 after pulling the latest changes from the repo.

Let me know what you think.