dasman’s World

A quick note for people who may find themselves in a similar bind….

In setting up a firewall, I needed to obtain a DSL modem. I didn’t need a fancy router with wireless, masquerading and inbuilt ice-cube maker – I just needed to transform an ADSL line into Ethernet.

So, I went into a “major chain” (who shall remain nameless) and was sold a DLink DSL-502T. I told them the requirements and was a little taken aback when the box they fetched me had “DSL Router” written all over it. “No worries” they assured me – apparently a labelling error at the factory, and it really was a modem….

Not so! After it didn’t work by just plugging it in, a quick scan through the manual showed that it was a router, and a capable one at that. As is standard with the other DLink kit I’ve played with, a cute little web interface, including a wizard for initial setup. Awesome for most, but completely useless for my requirements.

Luckily, a quick web search revealed a reference to some promo material mentioning “can be used as a modem”. No more information than that, but after playing around with the device it turns out if you cancel out of the “initial setup wizard”, there is in fact a configuration option to make the device operate as a “Bridge”. In this configuration, the device is essentially an ADSL modem.

So, anyone else out there finds themselves in this situation – its all good!

I tend to play in two programming worlds. Java, and Perl.

Cause the two languages have such similar features and cultures, right?

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of Java stuff. Whilst the formality can seem a little “stifling” compared to the more anarchic feel of Perl, I’ve grown to love some of the rigour, structure and engineering that you seem to find in Java. And in turn, I’ve discovered that this stuff exists in the Perl world as well – you just have to look for it. Javadoc = Perldoc. JUnit = Test::Harness. And so on.

But one of the things that I was really looking for in Perl was a good IDE. Once you’ve had Eclipse, my old Perl platform of Vim on Windows with Perl syntax highlighting just feels a little passe! So now, I’m using EPIC (http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net) – an Eclipse plugin that provides Perl support.

I’ve only dipped my toe in, but it looks good. Don’t go in expecting the same level of integration and support that Eclipse gives Java, but its still nice. The syntax highlighting seems pretty solid. The on-the-fly syntax checking is great. And the auto-complete (whilst not as comprehensive as the Java equivalent) is pretty neat.

There are other features that I haven’t had a chance to play with – a regular expression debugger that looks like it’d be great for those new to Perl (and regexps), a source-code formatter, and a few other things. I’m currently working on a reasonably sizable Perl script so hope to get to play with some of this over the coming weeks.

But, summary – big step up over a simple text editor with colourisation, and at a price thats hard to beat – free! I’ll be sticking with it as my Perl development environment for the forseeable future.

And big kudos to the developers – I’m looking forward to seeing where this plugin goes over the coming months!