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Jul. 27th, 2001 08:56 pmThere is a certain charm in doing a short translation of an article that has been copied, faxed, and otherwise assaulted so many times that it is a real challenge to make out what is being said in among all those black bits on the white background.
The secret lies in the redundancy of the language, meaning that certain letters only really go with others, and certain turns of the phrase chunk information into even larger units that can take a lot of abuse, presentation-wise, and still be recognizable, as in:
"Givo we ii6erty 0r giVo mo dea7h!"
I spent some time afterward trying to get X Windows to do Cyrillic. I think I am halfway there, since the font Mozilla uses to render Cyrillic on my friends page here has changed, and for the better.
I am probably more than halfway, as I have also installed a utility, xruskb, that will allow me to switch between Latin and Cyrillic keyboards, but right now, all I can get out of my keyboard in "RUS" mode is:
QWERTYUIOP
кгхлеозыэъ
(and that's supposed to be in KOI8-R). On my screen, the Cyrillic appears as lower-case Latin letters with diacritical marks over them.
One thing common to most of the font packages I looked at for X Cyrillic fonts: they expect to see the Unix 'compress' utility somewhere in your path. Apparently, 'compress' is not part of Linux, but if you create a symbolic link from 'compress' to 'gzip', the process appears to work.
Mandrake Linux offers an X-based utility called 'DrakConf' that lets you change keyboards, but nothing appears to happen when I select a Russian keyboard. It may be worthwhile checking out whatever documentation is available about this feature.
In other news, I spelled Drew at the store today starting around 3:30 pm. During the slow moments, I continued to fool around with the Solitaire encryption algorithm, which requires a deck of cards to implement. As is the case with most crypto, the biggest problem is getting the wetware to work (i.e, stuff between ears). I was able to get about 7 or 8 correct keys before something went amiss and I vectored off into the unknown. When using a key-stream cipher like Solitaire, that means everything past an error is lost, no matter how well you execute after making it.
Enough babbling... and enough computers! It's time to relax.
Cheers...
The secret lies in the redundancy of the language, meaning that certain letters only really go with others, and certain turns of the phrase chunk information into even larger units that can take a lot of abuse, presentation-wise, and still be recognizable, as in:
"Givo we ii6erty 0r giVo mo dea7h!"
I spent some time afterward trying to get X Windows to do Cyrillic. I think I am halfway there, since the font Mozilla uses to render Cyrillic on my friends page here has changed, and for the better.
I am probably more than halfway, as I have also installed a utility, xruskb, that will allow me to switch between Latin and Cyrillic keyboards, but right now, all I can get out of my keyboard in "RUS" mode is:
QWERTYUIOP
кгхлеозыэъ
(and that's supposed to be in KOI8-R). On my screen, the Cyrillic appears as lower-case Latin letters with diacritical marks over them.
One thing common to most of the font packages I looked at for X Cyrillic fonts: they expect to see the Unix 'compress' utility somewhere in your path. Apparently, 'compress' is not part of Linux, but if you create a symbolic link from 'compress' to 'gzip', the process appears to work.
Mandrake Linux offers an X-based utility called 'DrakConf' that lets you change keyboards, but nothing appears to happen when I select a Russian keyboard. It may be worthwhile checking out whatever documentation is available about this feature.
In other news, I spelled Drew at the store today starting around 3:30 pm. During the slow moments, I continued to fool around with the Solitaire encryption algorithm, which requires a deck of cards to implement. As is the case with most crypto, the biggest problem is getting the wetware to work (i.e, stuff between ears). I was able to get about 7 or 8 correct keys before something went amiss and I vectored off into the unknown. When using a key-stream cipher like Solitaire, that means everything past an error is lost, no matter how well you execute after making it.
Enough babbling... and enough computers! It's time to relax.
Cheers...
