And you don’t suppose that I went into it headlong like a fool? I went into it like a wise man, and that was just my destruction. And you mustn’t suppose that I didn’t know, for instance, that if I began to question myself whether I had the right to gain power – I certainly hadn’t the right – or that if I asked myself whether a human being is a louse it proved that it wasn’t so for me, though it might be for a man who would go straight to his goal without asking questions…. If I worried myself all those days, wondering whether Napoleon would have done it or not, I felt clearly of course that I wasn’t Napoleon.

– Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Back when I first started learning Perl 5, I was excited to find the Perl Advent Calendar. It was a series of 24 or so short articles about useful Perl modules or techniques, with one new entry each day leading up to Christmas. A few years later, the Catalyst crew started the Catalyst Advent Calendar. I always liked the Perl Advent Calendars, and kept meaning to contribute. Every time, though there were too many things I’d want to write about – and mostly they were my own code, so I felt sort of smarmy and self-promoting and never did it.

I’ve been working on a library for writing sprintf-like routines. This has led me to learn quite a lot about sprintf. If you’re ever looking to be amazed at how complex one routine can be, look at perldoc -f sprintf. It’s not the most complex builtin in Perl 5 (I think), but it’s up there. I think open wins.

I got into the office yesterday and sent my Xbox 360 a “please download the L4D2 demo” message. Gloria was kind enough to switch it on, and when I got home it was waiting for me. Also waiting for me was a new set of cheap Turtle Beach Ear Force X31 headphones. I won’t get into the details on those right now, other than to say: so far, they’re great!

Originally, Email::MIME was part of the big initiative to make email modules that each did one thing very well. This got us a bunch of tools, including Email::MIME. Their API design was uneven, with some more successful than others. Email::MIME’s API has been relatively reasonable to work with, although it gets a bit hairy at the edges of quick-and-dirty email munging.

So, yesterday I wrote about Pod::Weaver’s history. Today, the much more useful topic of “how to use it now that it exists.”

One or two people who write Pod regularly said, “Yeah, I saw you blogging about that Pod thing. I had no idea what you were talking about.” A few other people said, “neat, but how do I use it?” Its documentation is getting better, but here’s a crash course in its history. Tomorrow I’ll write about its application (and maybe later I can turn this into some real docs).

There’s a bug in, I think, Pod::Simple. It’s been fixed, and affects only one release of the perl distribution: 5.10.1. Its effect is really amusing, though.

After numerous jerks and stops, Pod-Elemental is about as useful as it has to be for work on Pod::Weaver to really build up some steam.

I’m still really enjoying my Sony PRS-300. It’s a good piece of hardware and reading on it is pretty pleasant. I’ve been reading mostly free material, much of which is old stuff in the public domain. I’ve also read two Stephen King books that I bootlegged.