Yet another strange blog

Human memory has a funny way of working, some of us can read a text and easily memorize it, while others can’t even remember what they had for lunch the day before.

Computers can easily remember what they did using their short term memory, the RAM, or their long term memory, the hard drive, while we humans have to figure out ways to remember useful things, like birthdays, anniversaries, a part of a interesting text or the name of someone you met.

Your brain can also store big pieces of useful information, the problem usually happens when you think some information is useful but your brain insists to believe otherwise. For example, when you are studying for a difficult exam which you must pass (or you might lose the entire year), you are eager to retain every bit of information you come across, and even in moments like that your brain sometimes fools you and when that big difficult question arises for you to answer it you think: “I know I read this somewhere… what was it again?”

Our brain likes to remember things when they are put in a context. If you try to remember bits of sparse pieces of information, it’s most unlikely you will succeed. It seems that when you have a story about something you are trying to remember, even if you make the story up, things go really well. At this point I think most of you reading this post don’t even remember its title, at least that was the original intention. you see, the title didn’t connect to anything, it was a sparse piece of information your brain easily discarded.

It would be a lot easier for you to remember if the title was: “The King and the Queen are dead because the Queen thought the King was cheating on her and killed him, afterwards she killed herself.”

Even though the title would be a lot bigger, you would still remember the idea correctly.

I have been searching for ways to learn German for a while now, and I think i finally found something good for free. Its the course Deutsch – warum nicht?. Of course you can take German courses with a qualified professor, and the way I see it, that is the best way to learn German. But Hey, this is free!!! And that is good stuff!

Here is a problem that i had sometime ago when i tried to see a French movie (Nuit de Noces). The subtitles were all wrong and changing all subtitles using one time offset didn’t fix my problems, i also had to change the time speed of the subtitles.

The problem had presented itself, and many solutions for this problem could be found in the Internet, nice graphical programs that were capable of changing the subtitles the way I wanted. Still this problem reminded me of those cool computer problems I use to solve just for fun during my time in the University and I wanted to solve it by myself. So, to give some contribution to the Linux users while having a fun time, I tried to create a program that one could run in the shell prompt, which is awesome!

Using Linux tools I thought of a perfect way (to me at least) to solve this problem, I didn’t have to worry about walking trough every line in the text file and the regexp stuff, which we obviously need here, would just be there. Almost every Linux user must know what I’m talking about: it’s awk! A awk program would make my subtitle problems go away and I would be able to watch my movie in peace.

So here is what I did. I hope it helps those of you who are having the same kind of problems i had. The part where you think of the algorithm to solve your problem is really easy, the hard stuff, at least for me, was to do some work in each line if that line matched a pattern, and awk made that a peace of cake.

Just so you guys know, after going through all those problems, I found out that the movie wasn’t all that good, but you can have a few laughs. I recommend watching it tough.

As this is still day one of 2010, happy new year!