Why is the @PMHarper Twitter account, verified by Twitter as belonging to Stephen Harper, following the porn-industry related account @freepornpics?

Apparently @PMHarper has been following @freepornpics for quite some time. In the blog Morton's Musings, James C Morton (a candidate for the Liberals in Oshawa) apparently first noted the connection back on August 3, 2010.

Sure enough, the twitter relationship is still there as of this writing. I confirmed the linkage by using the Twitter Application Program Interface to download a list of numerical user ID's -- used internally by Twitter -- relating to the followers of @freepornpics, and sure enough @PMHarper's id is among those ids.

Stephen Harper's @PMHarper numerical twitter id is 7401202. @freepornpics numerical twitter id is: 38949870. With that information in hand we can search the list of numerical twitter ids for @freepornpics followers to see if @PMHarper's id is within the data. It is:

$ curl http://twitter.com/followers/ids.xml?screen_name=freepornpics >freepornpics-twitter-followers
$ grep 7401202 freepornpics-twitter-followers
<id>7401202</id>

It will probably comfort Stephen Harper to know that @freepornpics also returns the favour and follows @PMHarper right back:

$ curl http://twitter.com/followers/ids.xml?screen_name=PMHarper >pmharper-twitter-followers
$ grep 38949870 harper-twitter-followers
<id>38949870</id>

Apparently pornographers are interested in Stephen Harper too. That's quite a big blue tent Harper has, uh, erected.

One doubts that Stephen Harper gets up late at night to surf the internet for porn but he ought to at least face the question.

Help yourself to the images or data!

Antonio Cuni yesterday posted a useful hack that brings colour and improved completions to the Python interpreter.

Attached is a minor patch which updates rlcompleter_ng.py to run on both Python 2 and 3 platforms.

On FreeBSD (and virtually every other system with a stock libreadline v 5.2) you'll need to patch libreadline - apply this patch to the source in /usr/src/contrib/libreadline. Don't forget to remake Python after making and installing the patched libreadline.

Looks lovely, thanks Antonio!