irisquest.net

Can we see the world through objective eyes, or are we always the slaves of our own experiences?

"Nocturnes" was my first reading encounter with Kazuo Ishiguro. Due to the nature of the book, a compilation of short stories on the theme of music at nightfall, I think it might be a bit different compared to his usual works.

"The Road" is the desolate tale of a father and child through the aftermath of an unnamed catastrophic event. At first it might sound as just another post apocalyptic tale, but in reality, it's a lot more. It's about the inner states, transitions, the will to go further - and also about trying to cope with the remembrances of a golden past, when surrounded only by desolation.

A few moments ago I finished reading "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley and I wanted to share my thoughts on the book while they were still fresh.

One thing always puzzled me when working with CSS style sheets - how do browsers interpret conflicting attributes?

Certainly the order in which attributes appear in the CSS files and the selectors used play an important role - but isn't there anything more to it?

Today I decided to give Emacs another go. I was quite decided to stick with Vim, until I ran into a few XML formatting issues. The XML support is a bit limited and unfortunately it's not the only one on the list. I still think it's a great editor and knowing a few shortcuts always saves the day - and it's also deployed by default on all Unix like machines.

While working with web applications, there are two cases when the ability to browse pragmatically web pages can be very useful: testing and screen scraping. This Perl script provides the ground basis for both - all you need is to insert the specific code for processing a page.

While testing a web application, sometimes it's useful to batch test a number of URLs. Even more, some applications might not be too friendly towards free browsing, thus when testing something like this, it might be a good idea to keep some sort of state on the client (cookies for example).

Last.fm has one small feature that I miss a lot: a direct link on the video page to the original YouTube page. Of course, this only applies to videos from YouTube, but I'm amazed they didn't introduce this yet (or maybe I'm just too blind to see it).

Today I finally took the time to have a look over GreaseMonkey. What I found odd was the apparent lack of "Hello World" samples or simple tutorials. I read the common pitfalls from the manual and I also skimmed through most of the manual, but I must admit that was a little bit boring.