Here’s a random trick that gave me a few, er, seconds of amusement.

Click in your browser-of-choice’s search bar (I assume you use a browser sensible enough to have such a thing) and type a skeptical/ambivalent smiley, :-/

Somehow I doubt that’s supposed to happen …

(At least MSN and Yahoo! are kind enough to show a “no results found” message!)

Maybe this will save some stress for someone else who is, as I presently am, stuck cooking Perl late at night.

If you’re doing anything with the URI module, or using a module that calls URI (in my case, WWW::RobotRules) and you get this error …

Can't locate object method "host" via package "URI::_generic"

… check that the URL that you are feeding to it is happy, good, and fully-qualified. Then check it again. No, seriously, make sure it’s got everything a URL should have, including boring stuff like protocols and trailing slashes.

In my case, after various forms of cursing and suspicions that the Debian folks had incorrectly packaged a module somewhere, I discovered that feeding http://foo.bar/robots.txt to WWW:RobotRules, rather than foo.bar/robots.txt, made it all just work. Mutter grumble stupid non-descriptive error message …