Saturday, May 11, 2013

AnyBackup 1.0.0 Released

It's been about a year since I last did anything with AnyBackup -- that's not because I lost interest, but rather because it'd simply been working and did everything I wanted it to.

I finally mustered up some motivation to make some improvements, though. I spent the last week straight overhauling the codebase. I unit tested all the major non-UI modules and while I was at it I refactored all the code for sanity and for PEP styling issues. This took way, way longer than adding new features (not surprising).

Since it's been a year I figured why not do this in style and make this a milestone 1.0.0 release.

Changes:

  • Unit tests (hopefully less bugs and less breaks in the future)
  • Display transfer rates and total copy progress
    • It's a little rough, and transfer rates are calculated in a very naive way, but it's better than nothing
  • Warn users when a backup is going to delete old files from any backup drives
  • Proper threading model
    • Previously threads were killed on demand via a nasty kill/hack and it did not ensure consistent data, etc
    • New model nicely requests thread death and long running thread processes have been refactored to comply
  • Code clean up, PEP style conventions
  • Migrate from Pyro3 -> Pyro4
    • Pyro4 has async calls which is needed for the proper threading model mentioned above

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Metro 2034 - English Fan Translation

Word on the street (or rather the Last Light forums) is that there's going to be an official Metro 2034 English translation released. Well... the rumor has it that the translation was already supposed to be released. Obviously that hasn't happened yet. This rumor began circling unbeknownst to me, otherwise I probably wouldn't have bothered finishing what I'm about to post here.

But without further adieu, I give you a cleaned up version of Metro2033Artjom's fan translation of Metro 2034!

There are some pretty big caveats:

  • It's no more accurate than the original fan translation (probably a good deal less so)
  • There were a few sentences I couldn't make heads or tails of so I scrapped them
  • I may have butchered a passage here and there thatI thought I understood
  • It's probably been colored/influenced/altered significantly by my style and humor
With that warning out of the way (and if you're still reading) I'll get to the good bits. I cut out a staggering amount of awkward phrasing and confused verbiage. (And probably introduced a few of my own, but shhhh... were't not talking about that!) I tried to throw in common (American) English idioms where I could and rearranged sentence structures that tweaked my brain. I may have had a little too much fun with Leonid's dialog in places, but what can I say? I like the character.

If you think my copy is crap (hey it's a free internet... or not, depending on your country) feel free to peruse the original fan translation here. I take no credit for this original translation, just the subsequent editing and interpretation I provide here. It was translated to English from the official German translation. If you're wondering what that can do to literature... I'll let this video do the talking:



Anyway, as I'm sure you've skipped everything above, here are the download links:


Let's all hope they actually do release an official English translation. I've got my fingers crossed!

P.S. To any lawyery-types. If there are copyright concerns here, please contact me, it was not my intention.

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