I can't help but think that the Liberals, at least, have managed to avoid a landmine thanks to the Governor General granting Harper's request to prorogue parliament. Oh to have been a fly on the wall to eavesdrop on that conversation. Perhaps Harper's minions will do us all a favour and accidentally release an unauthorized tape.

Puzzlement of the day: Did someone in the Liberal Party deliberately sabotage Dion's recorded speech yesterday? Is internecine warfare alive and well in the LPC?

The answer to the last question has nothing to do with the former, and I present it here in code: Does the day of the week start with a consonant? If so, the answer is yes, internecine warfare is alive and well in the LPC.

My apologies for posting a link to the National Post; while I don't normally seek them out, they have the most complete timeline describing the tape saga.

Heads up to package maintainers and Unix/Linux users: Depending on your system's package system you may run into problems like this build problem on FreeBSD, should you make Python 3 your base install of Python:

$ portmaster -B firefox3
 |snip|
 /usr/local/bin/python ../toolkit/xre/make-platformini.py --print-buildid > buildid
   File "../toolkit/xre/make-platformini.py", line 15
     print datetime.now().strftime('%Y%m%d%H')
                  ^
 SyntaxError: invalid syntax
 gmake[3]: *** [export] Error 1
 gmake[3]: Leaving directory `/usr/ports/www/firefox3/work/mozilla/config'
 gmake[2]: *** [export_tier_base] Error 2
 gmake[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/ports/www/firefox3/work/mozilla'
 gmake[1]: *** [tier_base] Error 2
 gmake[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/ports/www/firefox3/work/mozilla'
 gmake: *** [default] Error 2
 *** Error code 2

 Stop in /usr/ports/www/firefox3.
 *** Error code 1

I must admit I'd not thought of FreeBSD's ports system as being vulnerable to Python 3 changes, but of course "scripting" languages like Python (and Ruby and Perl and ...) are heavily used by thousands of package distributions.

The simple fix: Keep the 2.x line of Python on yours systems... ../bin/python will just have to point to 2.x for the time being.