In January, I ordered an Xbox 360 Play & Charge Kit from Amazon. It’s a NiMH battery pack with a USB cable to connect the controller (also a charger) to the Xbox. It arrived a few days later. While the cable would power the controller, its “charging” light wouldn’t come on and it didn’t seem to be charging the controller. The kit came with a piece of paper that said, “In case of problems, do not return! Contact Microsoft!”

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.