Two Things...

1) I used to have a simple plugin to MT that crossposted to LJ perfectly well. MT4 broke it, but someone else wrote a new version with a much better front end...except it requires things called "DateTime--Locale" and "XML::Parser." (As is so often the case lately, I had to do a lot of research to figure out that they were missing; as good as the MT folks are at writing software now, no one seems willing to document anything anymore.) Manipulating these things (one's a Perl script; I have no idea what the other is) has always been just beyond the edge of my abilities; is there anyone who can tell me what I need to do to install them? Until I know this is fixed I'm not going to be posting a lot; double-posting is a hassle and I don't like leaving anyone behind.

2) Has anyone else noticed that the QuickPost in MT4 doesn't actually autofill fields in a way that humans want to use? Instead of the old way:

[subject]--blank--[/subject]
[post]
[a href=URL]PAGE TITLE[/a]
[/post]

it's now:

[subject]PAGE TITLE[/subject]
[post]
URL[br /][br /]
[/post]

I didn't always want it to appear exactly the old way, either, but I never want a new post to appear in this format, and I spend an annoying amount of time pushing things around to get everything the way I want it. Is there some way to customize this behavior?

Edit: While I'm on the subject of features with little or no target audience...hey, Firefox, who are the lunatics for whom you made the DELETE key a keyboard shortcut for the BACK button? If we found and killed them, would you disable this so we stop accidentally losing our work?