In the English language the demonstrative pronouns that we we have are the singular this and that, and the plural these and those. In Shakesperian times the extra one was yon, for example:

You gods that made me man, and sway in love,
That have inflamed desire in my breast
To taste the fruit of yon celestial tree,
Or die in the adventure, be my helps,
As I am son and servant to your will,
To compass such a boundless happiness!

yon celestial tree feels much warmer and more poetic than.
To taste the fruit of that celestial tree.
To taste the fruit of this celestial tree.

We are quite fortunate in Northern Ireland to still have yon and thon in regular use, and it is a demonstrative pronoun that we should nurture and cherish and use often.
For those unfamiliar with the local dialect, it's difficult to think of a suitable example to demonstrate the use, but if I was talking of a shop at the end of the road, I might say:
"You know that wee shop at the end of the road", if I was talking fondly of an old shop I used to visit in years gone by I might say:
Do you mind thon wee shop beside Grannys. Yon man that ran it was a right eejit.

Posted by jaffs at 08:23 AM | Permalink

Esquire magazine gives us a little bit of local history surrounding the 17th July Nationalist Bonfires on the Shankhill ((sic) Road

Posted by jaffs at 09:33 PM | Permalink

The great EV1 story that has surfaced recently is certainly an interesting tale for those who like a conspiracy theory.

• Wikipedia EVI entry.
  
• An electric car booted.
  
• Plugged into car debate.
  

Posted by jaffs at 10:01 AM | Permalink

I was working with the file upload yolk of CGI.pm, and more accurately the code after the following comments in the documents.

When a file is uploaded the browser usually sends along some information along with it in the format of headers. The information usually includes the MIME content type. Future browsers may send other information as well (such as modification date and size). To retrieve this information, call uploadInfo(). It returns a reference to an associative array containing all the document headers.

The docs tell describe getting the MIME type like so.
$filename = param('uploaded_file');
$type = uploadInfo($filename)->{'Content-Type'};

This works fine in Mozilla browsers but the param('uploaded_file') described above is garbage in IE, IE appears to pass the full path to the file on the users operating system as described here.

Different browsers will return slightly different things for the name. Some browsers return the filename only. Others return the full path to the file, using the path conventions of the user's machine. Regardless, the name returned is always the name of the file on the user's machine, and is unrelated to the name of the temporary file that CGI.pm creates during upload spooling.

So in order to get the correct MIME TYPE regardless of the browser I had to call uploadInfo on an open filehandle like so.
my $up_handle = $q->upload("bin_file");
$type = $q->uploadInfo($up_handle)->{'Content-Type'};

Maybe I have read the documentation wrong but if I interpret it as it appears to me, the docs seem to be wrong.

Posted by jaffs at 04:13 PM | Permalink

I bought one of these cameras a couple of years ago.

Now I'm not one for spending a lot of time researching and comparing products, I have an inbuilt impulse that forces me to buy something when I like the image the advertisers are portraying ( did I just admit that). This has lead me to be described as a fashion victim on a number of occasions, most notably recently by my Dad when I purchased a new digital camera.
In an anti-nerd kind of way I enjoy doing this, there's more to life than spending hours on comparison and review sites before buying something recommended by an uber nerd writing a gadget blog in an anime tshirt and a pair of y -fronts.
This DVD camera was one of those fashion victim purchases, the TV advert with the bloke shooting video then jumping through a balcony to slot the mini DVD in to a strangers DVD player was just the type of simplicity I was looking for.
The reality was rather different, to cut a long story short, the mini DVDs did not play in any DVD player I had access to except the Sony Picot joke DVD player that came free with the camera. After shooting the video, you have to finalise the dsic which can take about 30 minutes before it plays. The software which comes with the camera is woeful for editing so you tend to burn all your movies straight from camera to DVD meaning that you have hours of great footage of people's feet and the inside of the lens cap.
This got me looking at the files and trying to work with them, a little research showed that the native format is .MPG before finalising. When you connect the DVD camera by USB the disc does not mount to allow quick transfer, so you have to use the crappy Image Mixer software to import the files.
Once imported I tried a few software packages to edit the files, Pinnacle was one, I can't remember the other, both imported the video but failed to capture the audio.
Womble MPEG Video Wizard DVD is a dedicated MPEG editing tool which seems to read the files and allows output to standard DVD. So if you find yourself with an obsolete DVD camera (something I have christened the Betamax effect) I suggest trying Womble.

Posted by jaffs at 09:48 AM | Permalink