rlm_perl authorization/authentication and %RAD_CONFIG questions

[dorkusmonkey]

  I am running  FreeRADIUS Version 2.1.5, for host i686-pc-linux-gnu,
have successfully configured rlm_perl and have it working with a
modified example.pl file.  I have noticed that the authorize callback
in example.pl gets called before the authentication callback.  From
http://www.mail-archive.com/freeradius-users@lists.freeradius.org/msg01706.html
, this looks like this is expected behavior.  I apologize if I am
missing something, but shouldn't authentication come before
authorization?  Shouldn't those two functions be called in reverse
order?

  Also, I would like to pass in some configuration parameters to the
example.pl script.  I assume that is what the %RAD_CONFIG variable is
there for, but I cannot seem to get anything meaningful into that hash
( as a test, I print out all hash keys for %RAD_CONFIG whenever a
callback in the example.pl is called, and all I can see is a null
valued 'Auth-Type' field ).  I looked briefly at the source, but
nothing jumped out at me as being obviously associated with
configuration values and the %RAD_CONFIG variable.  I was hoping
someone could tell me how to get access to configuration value pairs
from the example.pl file (hopefully without parsing the files myself
from within the perl script) or at the very least point me in the
right direction in the source so that I can figure this out myself.

Thank you,
dorkusmonkey