8 Ways to Sunday

Just got this via e-mail:

Danny O’Brien of Oblomovka has created a Python program to locate “found haiku” in any text. I haven’t had any luck getting it to work myself, but the hilarious results he gets from running it on e-mail spam is motivation enough to keep trying.

I wouldn’t think that anyone would actually need this how-to guide on chopping vegetables, but my mother has cut herself enough times that I know better.

(Props: Lifehacker)

Update, 11/06/2007

The link above now goes to a promotional website for the book Knife Skills Illustrated: a User’s Guide, written by the same guy who wrote the 2005 how-to article. The original article is no longer available.

Thanks to Alex for cluing me into this with his comment (below).

Dog or Higher, the weblog of Westciv Software, has a great article about the adoption rate of the Firefox web browser among both web developers and the general population.

The author bases his analysis on concepts from The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. Attempting to ferret out the truth behind heavily-hyped browser statistics, he applies the raw data to Moore and Gladwell’s theories about sociological trends, marketing, and adoption of new technologies.

The gist: Firefox is in a critical stage of heavy use among technologically-savvy early adopters, and is getting a lot of media hype for the small dent it’s placed in Internet Explorer’s market share. To truly catch fire with the mainstream Web user, however, more advocacy and evangelism from the current user community will be needed.

I’m doing my part, having set up my mother, a neighbor, and a coworker with Firefox. Are you doing yours?

(Props: Ravensky.org)

Every so often, I start thinking that I should buy a Mac.

All the pretty eye candy in the interface and the promises of speed and stability start to make me forget what a pain in the ass the Mac interface can be to actually use and how stable Windows XP is. The oohing and ahing in the press over the latest Macintosh model somehow makes me forget that I could assemble something just as fast, stable, and good looking as a Power Mac for a third the price.

At times like these, I’m grateful for hilarious parody videos like this for knocking some sense into me.