Perl’s DateTime module can (usually) figure out the local timezone on its own. Don’t know why I didn’t know this — it’s right there in the docs.

our $App::LocalTZ = DateTime::TimeZone→new( name => ‘local’ ); … # then everywhere else my $dt = DateTime→new( …, time_zone => $App::LocalTZ );

It’s straightforward to convert a static library to a shared one

ar -x mylib.a
gcc -shared *.o -o mylib.so

catdoc converts doc and rtf files to text, and, so far in my brief acquaintance with it, does so better than antiword and unrtf. And it comes with xls2csv and catppt as well.

axi-cache is a lot more useful than apt-cache for searching through debian package info. It’s part of apt-xapian-index which uses Xapian to index the data.