I’ve tried a lot of fonts for Cyrillic. My favourite is Georgia.

As a non-native Russian speaker, there’s something about serif fonts, either on-screen or in print, that makes the text so much more legible.

On Vladimir Putin

Some interesting writing on Putin in Der Spiegel on Vladimir Putin. An interview with political scientist Ivan Krastev on Putin’s motivators and his psychological state and worldviews.

“In 2008, during the war against Georgia, he [Putin] met with Alexei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of the Ekho Moskvy radio station, which was one of the last critical media outlets in the country until it was shut down last week. Putin asked if Venediktov knew what he, Putin, had done in his previous job. Mr. President, Venediktov replied, we all know where you come from. Do you know, Putin said, what we did with traitors in my previous job? Yes, we know, said Venediktov. And do you know why I am speaking with you? Because you are an enemy and not a traitor!”

I alluded to this nuance involving variable scope in my post on automating pdf processing, but I wanted to expand on it a bit.

Consider this little snippet:

i=0
printf "foo:bar:baz:quux" | grep -o '[^:]\+' | while read -r line ; do
   printf "Inner scope: %d - %s\n" $i $line
   ((i++))
   [ $i -eq 3 ] && break;
done
printf "====\nOuter scope\ni = %d\n" $i;

If you run this script - not in interactive mode in the shell - but as a script, what will i be in the outer scope? And why?

Soviet maps of UK and North America

This is from an interesting collection of maps of the UK and North American cities produced by the Soviet Union. You can search for maps of particular locations.

What we learned about each other

What I hate most about the past half decade is what we learned about each other. Call me naive, but I never imagined that uncles, cousins and friends I loved and respected would so effortlessly embrace Fascism. I never imagined they would elevate some TV conman to a deity.

I have written previously about stripping syllabic stress marks from Russian text using a Perl-based regex tool. But I needed a means of doing in solely in Python, so this just extends that idea.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

def strip_stress_marks(text: str) -> str:
   b = text.encode('utf-8')
   # correct error where latin accented ó is used
   b = b.replace(b'\xc3\xb3', b'\xd0\xbe')
   # correct error where latin accented á is used
   b = b.replace(b'\xc3\xa1', b'\xd0\xb0')
   # correct error where latin accented é is used
   b = b.replace(b'\xc3\xa0', b'\xd0\xb5')
   # correct error where latin accented ý is used
   b = b.replace(b'\xc3\xbd', b'\xd1\x83')
   # remove combining diacritical mark
   b = b.replace(b'\xcc\x81',b'').decode()
   return b

text = "Том столкну́л Мэри с трампли́на для прыжко́в в во́ду."

print(strip_stress_marks(text))
# prints "Том столкнул Мэри с трамплина для прыжков в воду."

The approach is similar to the Perl-based tool we constructed before, but this time we are working working on the bytes object after encoding as utf-8. Since the bytes object has a replace method, we can use that to do all of the work. The first 4 replacements all deal with edge cases where accented Latin characters are use to show the placement of syllabic stress instead of the Cyrillic character plus the combining diacritical mark. In these cases, we just need to substitute the proper Cyrillic character. Then we just strip out the “combining acute accent” U+301 → \xcc\x81 in UTF-8. After these replacements, we just decode the bytes object back to a str.