Are there any modules on CPAN that you've used and found somehow deficient? If there are any modules that simply need maintenance, a code review, or better documentation, I'd be willing to talk to the authors and ask if they'll take my help.

oh baby, i've got a few for you.

• Net::Traceroute, with all due respect to the author, is hopelessly fubar. Often it returns the host being 255.255.255.255 or 0.0.0.0 with no errors whatsoever. It actually is just a parser for the system `traceroute` call and thus cant be expected to think very hard. The ever-so-cool cleen otherwise known as bind has constructed a small perl script to create raw packets -- it would be very easy to implement traceroute from this.
• Archive::Tar was never intended to work with scalars instead of files, and does not play with others. See relevant post here. Working with IO::Scalar would make it excellent, but i should be able to just slurp in a file, detar it, and write it out. It doesnt let you do that.
• Convert::UU seems to have almost no purpose for being anymore since perl 5+ has pack 'u'.
• XML::DOM has given me no end of trouble as of late...

and these are just the modules that have recently irritated me. there are others... :)

--
transcending "coolness" is what makes us cool.