For about a month, I have had a hex dump of an iCab cookies file hanging over the desk where I usually sit, and today I got tired of it being there. I wrote HTTP::Cookies::iCab today.
I like hex dumps. Figuring out binary formats can be a lot of fun if I have the right number of different colored highlighters. A hex dump is like a crossword puzzle---I start off knowing nothing, but the more I figure out the easier I figure out the rest. One of these days I want to write a color-coding dumper so I do not need the highlighters.
The iCab format seems redundant, and I do not use all of the information in a record when I set up the HTTP::Cookies object. At least it is not in the Apple plist format which is a really dumb format that I had to play with to make HTTP::Cookies::Safari. I wonder what people think when they come up with these formats. There must be some twisted code to create these things. Most of these strange formats have their own idea of time, so every format makes me discover their offset from the unix epoch. Someday I will write a program to figure that out too, but for now I still use my trusty HP-48 calculator.
I did not want to finish the module tonight, but I could not sleep since the unit tests did not pass. Now they do, so I can go do something else---perhaps sleep. The paper is off of my wall, I only need to fill in one more function, and then I take this off of my to do list and get back to what I should be working on---XML::RSS.
