I got to thinking today about what it is that really makes Python a great language. In fact, it’s missing some features that I like (e.g. closures). Obviously it has a whole bunch of cool features, but then so do most of the other dynamic languages (like Ruby, PHP or Perl) — for those of you who don’t know me, I’m much happier in a dynamic/interpreted language environment than a static/compiled one (and yes I know those pairs don’t strictly go hand-in-hand)

After thinking it through, I realized that it’s the maintainability of Python that makes it great. I can read through any Python that someone in my whole company has written and understand it and know why it’s working the way it is. And so can anyone else on my team, even without huge depth of experience in the language. The choices that have been made about its structure and support make it inclusive for anyone to be a part of the community, rather than inadvertently excluding certain types of people.

So, Python is now officially my language of choice, because more than any other language, it makes my team a happier place and wants me to be part of its community.

In fact, the two guys that started the MUD worked together at Inktomi (now owned by Yahoo!) and got me a job there in early ‘99 that I was in for almost 4 years.

I’m still in touch with a few of the guys from the MUD, and of course Facebook and other popular social networking tools make it a lot easier to get back in touch.

Digging in my various archives, I discovered the source code for the MUD. It doesn’t easily compile any more, so I got back in touch with John who was the original coder … 10 minutes later he was trying to get the thing to compile so we can keep the spirit of Razor’s alive!

I’m still rooting through bugs, but things will be up and running soon. Once they are I’ll post an update.

I’ve got an Upcoming.org event for it too.

It’s only somewhat mo-like at the moment, primarily because I haven’t decided exactly what I’m going to do with it.

Setting up mail to work on Mail.app is very simple, assuming your Exchange server is correctly set up. Put in your e-mail address and password, and poof! it’s done. Calendaring on iCal set up must happen automatically as I don’t recall ever having to do anything there.

Mail has a somewhat frustrating keyboard shortcut for send (Cmd-Shift-D) compared to the Cmd-Enter of Entourage. That was my only real gripe, although I’ve been using Mail for long enough that this is really just a matter of retraining the fingers. Mail crashed and froze a couple of times importing all my e-mail from Exchange (I had about 20,000 messages, plus attachments) but eventually it got there. I can use the same security certificate to sign and encrypt e-mail as I did with Entourage, with no extra set up required, which was awesome. Typical mail use throughout the day is generally better, as the Mail app is more responsive and intuitive than Entourage, and integrates properly with all my other apps.

iCal however falls short in a lot of ways. Historically, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with iCal, primarily due to the months I spent writing SyncBridge, a failed app that was designed to fix a lot of the shortcomings of iCal. (Why did it fail? A buggy Apple API in Tiger (Sync Services, deprecated in Leopard) combined with Apple announcing their Calendar Server and me burning out trying to write the app while holding down a day job – I feel this historical context is important as I have no doubt it biases me). However, I was keen to give iCal the benefit of the doubt and I thought that surely anything would be better than Entourage.

The verdict? Well, it’s better in some ways and worse in others. Here’s the gripe list:

I cannot subscribe to any calendar other than my own. In organizations running Exchange, there are typically shared calendars that many users can read and write from – this is useful in things like event planning, team rota and so forth. I can’t access these at all from iCal.

iCal receives the click to highlight the window, and creates an event for me from that click, which I never intend – thus I waste time deleting the event.

All my events are the same colour. Yes, I can have multiple calendars and thus multiple colours, but as I said above I can only subscribe to my own calendar. Previously I would make things different colours so I could easily tell which meetings were regular recurrences that I’d booked versus stuff that my manager invited me to, versus stuff that someone not on my team invited me to, etc.

I can’t send any kind of message when I decline an event. This means I need to fire off an additional e-mail to say “Sorry, could you move this event forward an hour” or whatever. I also can’t accept or decline an event with sending a notification to the organizer (or the attendees when I’m the organizer). Not a big pain, until you discover that you also cannot cancel an edit. Yes, that’s right, if you edit an event and then decide that you don’t want to keep your changes – TOUGH LUCK! If you press Escape to close the editing window it asks you whether you want to send or go back to editing – no option to just throw away the edits! This was especially annoying when I made a change to meeting with 60 invitees that I didn’t need to send.

Also, I cannot update the meeting without also updating every attendee. This is annoying when I want to invite people to book the slot in their calendar, and then build up an agenda over time – I now need to keep the agenda separately, and fire an update just at the last minute.

Finally, forwarding an iCal invite requires a right-click. There is no menu option or context menu button or keyboard shortcut – you must right-click on the event and select “Mail Event”.

In summary then: Mail is an improvement on Entourage, iCal still needs a lot of work to come close to Entourage and Entourage is still short of Outlook. I know, I just said that a Microsoft app is a better than an Apple one. It’s true.

Update: I discovered after three days that I no longer like having facial hair. After shaving pretty much every day for the last 9 or 10 months I’ve become accustomed to it. Whodathunkit?

After a year of working at my current job, I have received 15,000 emails. This doesn’t include any automated ones (which I delete), spam, etc. I don’t feel like I get a lot of email, so I worked it out:

365 - (2*52) - 10 = 251 working days per annum
15000 mails / 251 days =~ 60 per day
(8 * 60) minutes per day / 60 emails = 1 every 8 minutes


I wonder if that’s a lot? That doesn’t count personal e-mail, which is in a separate system. Anyone else get lots more? I remember getting a lot more in previous jobs, but it might have been a perception thing.

I re-read Zapp again tonight. I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with that book over the years. I love the observations made in it, but I hate the mirror it holds up to my own faults as a manager.

If you’ve never read it, Zapp tells the story of supervisor Joe Mode and his employee Ralph Rosco, both of whom work for Normal Inc. making parts for normalators. Ralph invents a device which allows him and Joe to see into the 12th dimension, and thus able to see the feelings and energy in their department and the departments in the company.

Behind this somewhat cringeworthy fable are a bunch of lessons for empowering employees. Each time I read it, it is easy to see situations where I’ve Zapped (empowered) or Sapped (disempowered) a colleague or a team.

I gave away my last copy of that book in 2005. It’s nice to be in a situation where it’s beneficial again. I’ve come to the (maybe obvious) conclusion that it’s impossible to have a truly Agile organisation without empowerment. Maybe this is the real reason so many Agile projects fail.