...the new picture looks worse, partly since it's -supposed- to be one of the self-generated patterns, and partly because it's just graphically not as good (eg. the dangling 'or' at the bottom looks out-of-place).

So reformat it. Seriously, I just took a quick stab at it. I don't have the patience or skills, but I admire them in others.

But I'll agree with you on the warnings. What happened was that after developing it under Windows, when I tried it the first time on Linux, I didn't actually see the warnings until long after I'd published it.

I apologize in advance, but I don't run any program without running perl -c against it first, even for trivial edits. Many programs spew data (or runtime warnings) causing compiler warnings to scroll off the buffer, never to be seen again.