If you read a lot of web articles, chances are you have stumbled upon “i.e.” and “e.g.” in these essays. As a matter of fact, chances are you also misinterpreted them as “in example” and “example”.

First of all, “in example” doesn’t exist in English; it’s wrong grammar. You always say “for example”. And “e.g.” is not an abbreviation for the word “example” because the start of the word sounds like “eg”.

“i.e.” is a Latin acronym for “id est”, literally “that is”. You can thus see how wrong it is to think of it as “for example”; i.e. it would not fit if you read the use I just made of it as “in example”.

“e.g.” on the other hand really is “for example”, in Latin “exempli gratia”, literally “for the sake of example”.

As the third most spoken language in the world, it’s no wonder English has so many accents and spelling variations. But for anyone who’s learned French, or any French who’s learned English, there comes a striking difference with both languages that is only noticed as you get really advanced, in either French or English, depending on your case; the English language has an impressive lack of standardization.

While not talking of regional spoken differences like accents, but of spelling and form, the English language has no regulator. This is a situation most English writers take for granted. You write the spelling of the country you’re in. However, for a French speaker, this might come as a surprise, because there is no such thing as a different spelling of a given word in French between two different French speaking regions. Likewise, English speakers that learn French often get confused with this too, but the other way around, wondering if they should learn the Canadian way if they’re in America, or the French way if they’re elsewhere in the world.

But because French is regulated by the Académie Française, I answer that it does not really matter. What does is the accent you choose to speak the language, which, however, has very little to do with written language.

This is a strong point of French, as well as other widely spoken languages like Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, both of which surpass English with 2nd and 1st place, respectively, as most spoken languages. Note however that French has a more or less recognized second regulator called the Office Québécois de la Langue Française, located in the province of Quebec in Canada. The regulator does follow spelling rules of the Academy, but it exists to standardize Canadian specific styles, like not placing a thin non-breaking space after an exclamation mark, and, much as a mirror to the Canadian French population’s will to keep French alive in a majorly English-speaking continent, create new French words for English terms, especially in the field of Internet technologies, that the Académie Française has left in their English form but accepted in the language, as well as to define specific meanings of words that belong to Canadian French heritage or have diverged from the Academy’s original definitions, like Diner meaning Dinner in France and Lunch in Canada.

If you’re American or British, the answer is pretty straightforward; just use whatever they use in your country. But if you’re in Canada, where the spelling is so hybrid, the answer isn’t so simple. Spelling in Canada, although theoretically standardized, is far from being so. For example, even though the Oxford Canadian English dictionary spells color as colour, I haven’t seen once in my life any Eastern Ontarian, that is in proximity to the capital of Canada, spell color as colour. Comparatively, I’m used to spell humor as humour, even though my friends never do. This makes English, at least in Canada, a very unstable language in its written form, although the same could be said of its spoken form, which is also a weird hybrid in Canada, albeit being chiefly American.

Although this protest doesn’t present any way to solve the problem, even less decided which spelling to take (I can already hear the riots), I do believe that as an international language, English should be regulated. Afterall, it would make it easier on top of its already existing ease of learnability, a strong attribution, putting aside cultural history, to its rise as one of the most widely spoken language in the world., because even though French probably has the most reknowned regulator, it’s in my opinion at least one of the hardest languages to learn.

Today, I logged in my computer at work and Secunia PSI told me Windows itself was insecure and that I should update it. However, while checking for updates on Windows Update on that Windows XP SP3 machine, to no avail, I got nothing, my system being totally updated.

This may not be much, but it’s almost as if Secunia was begging me to upgrade to Windows 7. Well, I don’t control that at my work place, but maybe IT’s got the message.

“Téléverser”, the official word for “to upload” by the Office Québécois de la langue française, doesn’t exist in Google Docs (or Gmail or anything else Google)’s dictionary.

“Courriel”, the official word for “email” by the Office Québécois de la langue française, doesn’t exist in Google Docs (or Gmail or anything else Google)’s dictionary.

We live in a sad world… poor tortured French. I mean, the words are in my physical dictionary. Point made.

Now that Google Chrome supports Open Video as of somewhere along a version 3 update (hint. if you have the latest version, you got Open Video support), it’s time to make a table of where all of it is.

Here’s the report:

* “—” means the browser does not support any variation of Open Video whatsoever

Well, this is a happy development. Google could have gone and used their recently bought On2 codecs instead of supporting Theora, but they decided to support it anyway. That’s great, and what’s even better is Google is probably still going to use its On2 codecs in the future, hopefully making them open, giving way to like, Theora 2 A.K.A. VP8. Google Chrome even supports H.264 and AAC (I did not test for AAC+ and ++ yet), so that’s pretty cool too.

This also means a joyous ~17% of the browsing population can see Open Video, and 31% have browsers of which the latest version is compatible with some form of Open Video, which makes it far from irrelevant.  About 3% of the 17% uses Safari, which doesn’t support Theora, so Theora is already the major codec for Open Video (yatta!).

How many times have I heard the word Template pronounced as tem-pleyt by Canadian French people? I can’t count it.

How many times have I heard the word Template pronounced as tem-pleyt by Canadian English people? I can’t count it.

How many times have I heard the word Template pronounced as tem-pleyt by Americans? I can’t count it either.

My point? Template has never been pronounced tem-pleyt and it has always been pronounced tem-plit. It’s understandable from the perspective of someone who learned English as a second language. After-all, a plate, the thing you eat your food on, is pronounce pleyt, so it appears as somewhat of a given that Template be pronounced tem-pleyt. But it isn’t! It’s wrong and even well-known Americans that have a huge background in television like Leo Laporte pronounce it wrong.

The thing is, I think the way most of us tend to naturally wrongfully pronounce Template should be added to the English language. Maybe it’s an Americanism, but I don’t know, I haven’t heart it from Australians or British people. All I know is it’s probably the most widespread pronunciation mistake in the English language. It makes me think of the French “En fait”, literally “In fact”, which is often misspelled and mispronounced as “Enfaites” or “En faites”, most likely because of the following “Ne vous en faites pas”, where “faites” is a conjugated form of the verb “to do” and “fait” is the noun “fact”.

But while in French “Enfaites” it’s absolutely wrong and doesn’t even make sense written down, the noun Template is not misspelled at all and it’s simply a matter of pronunciation exceptions, because in reality Template should be pronounced tem-pleyt if it adhered to English pronunciation rules correctly.

So in the meanwhile, we should all learn to pronounce Template correctly and correct the fellas who don’t know. Or, if you are really obstinate, you can deliberately pronounce it wrong to continue pushing this mistake into mainstream English.

So, OMG, big news, or is it not. I was just so baffled today when I discovered my new chromium build, which is version 4.0, supported HTML 5 video just like Firefox, with yet another player interface which is fortunately very functional, not like YouTube, and acts similarly to other browsers, above having the same feature set, which is great because then you don’t get any display problem. The trick is they simply put the controls in overlay on top of the video, that way your video box is always the size or the video and you don’t have to account for the toolbar when making designs.

I’m pretty sure I’m super late, but I don’t recall this working in actual Chrome on Windows. So, if you impatient stable release users want to experience this and it’s not in 3.0, know that one morning it’ll work when Google will have silently updated your Chrome to 4.0, because really, they don’t give you a choice, and that’s a good thing.

Well, in any cases it was kind of hopped for, especially since Google bought On2, makers of VP3, which was released as open source by On2 in 2001, which subsequently became Theora. Luckily Google didn’t jump in the H.264 band wagon (kind of obvious they wouldn’t) and their move with On2 means they’ll surely bring us in the near future some crazy ass-kicking VP8 in a most likely open source fashion in browsers near us (hint: on Chrome first).

So, the world is great, it’s now 2 major browsers that support Open Video, 1 that supports half-open video (Safari & H.264, yes Apple, go go go iFrame format, but no really, I’m joking, I hate them, even though I’m editing on a Mac and I want an iPhone, what can I say, it just works better, and, app store anyone?), 1 that should but apparently still doesn’t and one lost case.

Yahoo Meme just opened its API. Great, really, but it looks like they just don’t care.

To go to Yahoo Meme, I’m forced to typing meme.yahoo.com. That’s cumbersome, too much when I can just type Facebook.com or Twitter.com, or even Tumblr.com while we’re at it.

Furthermore, where’s Yahoo Meme on Yahoo.com? Do they really care about their product. Why don’t they show it off on their home page? Make it as important as Yahoo Mail?

Yahoo is a weird company…

Just take around the comments on iTunes and you’ll notice that if it’s not some country songs from Taylor Swift, there is bound to be at least 2 or 3 defamatory comments of hate about the artist.

Based on what most people there say, we should all be converting ourselves to country music and cute romance songs where nothing too provocative happens.

It’s easy to be one-stared or five-stared all the time on iTunes. All you have to do is either be a pop song or include just too little clothes in your video. You then automatically become, from the opinions of haters, some kind of monster that doesn’t know what the real world is, or an icon of how the music industry has supposedly hit a low.

Ironically, sales figures say all the contrary. Do people really hate Britney Spears that much? No, much more people actually listening to music like her songs than any other songs on the planet. The same goes for big names like Celine Dion. There’s a lot of people here in Quebec, where Celine is from, who hate her and have actually never listened to her music.

The problem is people don’t realize the only thing with comments is the only people who go out of their way to make comments are the ones who don’t like it. YouTube realized the same thing; just about everyone gives either a 5 or a 1 star to videos in their ratings, and the percentage of people actually rating the videos is really low.

But again, even if haters might call “Charlie bit my finger” the most stupid thing on the planet, it’s incredibly popular, which can only translate by people linking it. Numbers talk, the few stupid comments don’t.

So my whole point is, are comments really useful when most of them are really just defamatory?

As an application developer of some sorts, you should tell yourself that when it’s not necessary, comments aren’t a real necessity. Really, iTunes could almost rate songs by saying “that many people bought this” and it would be tons of times better than looking at comments.

This was my very long comment of hate, ironically, towards comments.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the web was invented on UNIX-like systems, and as end users increase their use of the web, the way things are done in Linux and other UNIX-like systems is more and more aligned with the way the web works, for the simple reason the majority of today’s web sites are hosted on Linux machines.

While I recognize the importance of UNIX systems like BSD variants including Mac OS X, the focus here is on Linux, because Linux has a major player on the client-side now; Ubuntu. As for BSDs, they remain in the world of advanced super computing and rarely touch on client-side systems. And for Mac OS X, well it’s in the same situation as Windows.

On Windows, ever since its roots in MS-DOS, paths to files have been written with backslashes. Since UNIX is older and uses forward slashes for paths, it’s almost as if Microsoft used it as an excuse to be different.

On Mac OS X, the paths are written with a colon, but the internals of OS X are UNIX, so you can use the same forward slashes and syntax than on Linux, how confusing.

Before the Internet, the backslash on MS-DOS and Windows surely was recognized by everyone, as nearly everyone used Windows and nothing else. Once the Internet came in however, its UNIX roots brought in confusion on how to write web addresses, because UNIX uses forward slashes.

Nowadays though, the system path has been hidden in more recent systems like Windows Vista, Mac OS X and even Ubuntu so not to confuse users with web addresses. But one fact remains, the path system on Linux is exactly the same as the one on the web. For web developers even, understanding the folder structure on Linux (ie. that a double dot is a link to the previous folder) can bring a lot of clarity into basic hyper-linking.

I do not support the underemphasis on paths that’s happening in recent operating systems though, as I believe it makes systems work too much like magic for inexperienced users, which unfortunately makes them more insecure and confused with computing than anything else.

But system paths on Linux are at least the same as those on the web. Looking at a file’s properties in Windows will give you a path with backslashes, which is slightly confusing for users, while looking at a file’s properties on Mac OS X gives you a path with colons instead of slashes, which is even more confusing. Doing the same thing on Linux gives you straight up the exact same syntax as what you write for web site, something today’s users will recognize much more easily.

The same goes with case-sensitive, which is a fact on Linux, but not on Windows and Mac OS X. A user might wonder why typing www.apple.com/Ipod doesn’t work and www.apple.com/ipod works, but if everyone standardized, the confusion would go away.

In other words, it’s time to standardize and I’d like to see Windows 8 and Mac OS  X 10.7 change the way they display paths to align with Linux, as it is a natural extension of how we work today.