The version included in Drupal only supports YUI 2.5.x as the API has changed in 2.6. I have a new version which supports 2.6.x, but it has a layout bug, so I won't be submitting it until this bug is fixed. If you can tolerate the visual bug or want to help fix it, grab the lastest version of the IMCE plugin for Drupal's YUI Editor. Use the same installation instructions as last time.

Feedback welcome.

I have recently relocated my IT business from outer metropolitan Melbourne to country Victoria. The state of the internet in this country is a joke.

A professional associate of mine in Paris has access to 100Mbps down and 10Mbps up unlimited fibre. This costs him 45EUR p/m which includes line rental for a POTS equivalent phone service and basic cable TV. Setup is throw in if you take it for 1 or 2 years - he couldn't remember the term of the commitment.

I have a contractor in Hong Kong who has access to a network many times faster than people living in similar conditions in Melbourne.

In Tecoma I had access to business grade Naked ADSL2+ for $85 per month with 25G of data and a fixed IP address. Not included in the download quota was access to streaming radio, Linux and other Free/Open Source software (and some not so free), and some ABC content. If I exceeded my quota I would be shaped. The setup fee was $129. With this service I could use a high quality VoIP service for cheap calls overseas, where some of my clients and contractors are located.

Now I am living in country Victoria I am unable to even get ADSL1 - despite being informed by Telstra on 2 occasions that it was possible - "it won't be a problem just call us once you move in".

I am now stuck with a very sub optimal solution.

I am using currently using 2 HSDPA modems on the Optus network with directional antennas. During the week at best I can get 1.5Mbps/150kbps from each link. Each service has a 6G usage quota for $50p/m each, with excess usage charges of $153.60 per Gb (or 0.15c per Mb). All traffic is counted (both up and down).

The Optus network is stretched and even worse on weekends and evenings. The service is also unsuitable for VoIP, so I have to pay more for my calls too. Optus doesn't offer fixed IP addresses or an accurate tool for measuring usage. In every way their service is inferior to ADSL.

The equipment I used to set this up properly cost me close to $1000. I also spent several days setting it all up and paid for professional assistance with the project. As the service is not eligible for the Broadband Guarantee scheme I have to wear these costs as part of running a business in a rural area.

Satellite is completely unsuitable for my business due to the latency, slow speeds and a requirement of a minimum 2 year commitment. The claim that satellite offers a "metro-comparable level" of service is laughable - 1024/256kbps with 5G of data for over $100 per month and a $3000 setup fee is extortion.

My only other option is Telstra's Next G service which requires a 3 year commitment and costs considerably more than the similar service from Optus.

I am located near Newstead, less than 2 hours drive from the centre of Melbourne, not 200kms west of Uluru. I expect that I should be able to get reliable phone and internet services at reasonable prices with a choice of carriers. Based on my (somewhat limited) knowledge of the area less than half the connections from the exchange here can access ADSL. The current situation here is reliable, value for money or available - pick 2.

Anecdotal evidence would suggest that many businesses in rural areas are constrained by the lack of quality data services in their area. The lack of proper broadband services in rural areas must cost businesses millions of dollars every year. Local economies also suffer as people are unable to establish businesses which rely on reliable and affordable internet access and so the jobs and investment goes to the larger regional centres or metropolitan areas.

Based on overseas trends the National Broadband Network will be out dated before it is finished. Even with 98% coverage

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 1154 bytes)

Earlier today I finished off another Drupal based site. The client was pretty happy with it. Once they launch I will probably post a link.

The client came back to me and asked how they could insert images using the RTE. Based on some positive reviews I used the YUI Editor module this time around, instead of FCKEditor or tinyMCE for the rich text editor. The YUI Editor module doesn't support file browsing. I tried to see if someone had already hacked something together for this, if they had I couldn't find it.

In the past I have used the IMCE module for image browsing and uploading in FCKEditor or tinyMCE. Adding IMCE support to the YUI Editor module seemed like the fastest solution.

So here it is - the IMCE based image browser plugin for YUI Editor on Drupal 6.

Here is a quick howto. Install the YUI Editor and IMCE modules into your Drupal 6 install. Save the plugin tarball into your modules directory above the YUI Editor module and extract it. You should now have 2 extra files yui_editor/plugins called img_browser.inc and img_browser.js

Feel free to leave comments about how well this works for you. Enjoy!

Where is Green Gully you ask? It is near Newstead - a little town down the road from Castlemaine, which is near Bendigo. If you want to come and visit from Melbourne it is about 1.5 hours drive from the Airport or 2 hours from the CBD.

I now work in a mudbrick house, with bottled gas, tank water and mains feed Green Power. The plan is to eventually convert the garage into an office, but this will take some work. For now just the servers live in the garage. The office still isn't fully setup, but it is getting there - all the important stuff is working.

Connectivity has been a challenge. I now have a pair of Optus e169 HSDPA modems giving me internet access- most of the time. I plan to blog about my setup when I get some time. I hope to start blogging more about bush tech - time permitting.

I will still be travelling for work, be it Newstead, Castlemaine, Bendigo, Ballarat, Melbourne, nationally or internationally. If you have a project you wish to discuss with me, just contact me.

phpGroupware is unfortunately kinda dead these days, whereas eGroupware seems to have managed to keep some momentum.

Of course we had preferred keeping with phpGroupware when the two projects initially switched apart, in particular because the GNU project-linked QA/copyright policies were a guarantee that our contributions may be better protected in such a collaboration environment (we tried and help the phpGroupware as much as we could, btw, and parts of this history is told when looking at : http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/weblog/tag/phpgroupware/).

But the copyright policy is not all about successful collaboration, and it happens that phpGroupware fails to deliver from quite a few months now. Btw, I’m not so close to the project to tell exactly what’s happening and why, but looking at the mailing-lists, at least, the situation looks very bad.

So I dare say it lound : the phpGroupware project is quietly dying (at least from my point of view).

But as we need some improvements that were initially planned for its 0.9.18 release (filemanager, accounts, various stuff I’m not really qualified to list completely)… we need to consider what the options are…

And fortunately, it looks like eGroupware has not forked in a too much differing way, from a technical point of view, and that they have even improved some of the things we expected to be coming from phpGroupware 0.9.18.

So it’s very much likely that we’re going to try and switch to eGroupware for some parts of the platform to be deployed in the next month.

This may not concern the whole of the PicoForge infrastructure but only a particular project that builds on top of the current PicoForge infrastructure, with some variations.

As for the future of PicoForge as the libre software forge, it’s not really clear what’s gonna happen, but I think that we may be making a more radical switch some day, for instance by forgetting the old legacy PHP code, and so neither depending on phpGroupware nor eGroupware, but using some more modern tools/frameworks (and why not something like Tine 2.0 ? … no, but we may be inspired by some of its characteristics ;).

Qui vivra verra.

>>> from lxml.html import parse
>>> google = file("google_se.html") # saved google result page for "example"
>>> root = parse(google).getroot()

>>> [link.text_content()[:20] for link in root.cssselect(".g h3.r a")]
['Image results for ex', 'Example (rapper) - W', 'Example - Wikipedia,', 'MySpace.com - EXAMPL', 'Dynamic Programming ', 'example - definition', 'example - Definition', "Example - I don't wa", 'XML by Example - Goo', 'Example', 'example']

>>> [link.get("href")[:20] for link in root.cssselect(".g h3.r a")]
['http://images.google', 'http://en.wikipedia.', 'http://en.wikipedia.', 'http://www.myspace.c', 'http://www.avatar.se', 'http://www.thefreedi', 'http://www.merriam-w', 'http://www.youtube.c', 'http://books.google.', 'http://www.example.o', 'http://www.docbook.o']

Unlike 3, vodafone doesn't offer a public IP addresses to their "mobile broadband" customers. Vodafone pitch this as a business product. I don't agree with it, but I can see how you could justify only offering a NAT'd IP address when using your handset to access the internet or maybe even as a tethered modem. Such logic can't be sustained when offering a HSDPA modem as a "mobile broadband" service. If it is mobile "broadband" then it should be similar to a fixed line broadband service.

After discovering VF only offer a handful of gateways for their data customers, I tried finding out about getting a dynamic public IP address.

To cut a long story short, after 4 calls to data support, and about the same to corporate support, I was at a dead end. Consumer data support told me that I needed to talk to Corporate data support, who wouldn't talk to me as I wasn't a corporate customer.

Eventually I gave up and called the TIO, who, as always were great. I then called the Vodafone complaints team who struggled with all the details of broadband, public IPs, gateway IPs, various service acronyms and the terms which I had agreed to.

After a few more phone calls and waits I was finally awarded my dynamic static IP address. They add something to your account to give you access to the full access APN which gives you a public IP and no port restrictions. For the record the APN is "internet", instead of the normal "vfinternet.au", but this won't work unless VF enable it for you. I some how think Vodafone award access as a prize for persistence.

I did a quick check on the vf.au site again tonight and it seems the small print is the same, so if you sign up for the service I think you have good ground for getting a public dynamic IP like I did. It will just take jumping through a few hoops.

Update: The title should have read public not static IP.

We are not looking for website developers. If you are a web application developer with at least 2 years commercial PHP experience looking for contract work, email your resume to jobs@davehall.com.au. Make sure you include links to code you have worked on.

You should have FOSS development experience, although some of the work will be proprietary client systems, they will be built on top of FOSS stacks. We are based in Melbourne, but the current team is distributed, so telecommuting is fine. Experience with cross platform JS and CSS is essential. Knowledge of Zend Framework, PHPUnit and YUI are preferred. We value elegant quality solutions, as should you. A good grasp of written and spoken English is a must. Pay, hours and term of contract are all negotiable.

Update: The job has gone. We have one new contractor starting today and another will be starting work on small projects soon.

Then it happened, I accidentally clicked and dragged on the page. All of a sudden evince was highlighting the printed text on the page. This was a bitmap embedded in a PDF. Evince was using OCR to highlight the contents of the page.

There are moments every so often I am amazed by the features talented hackers add to FOSS. This was one of those moments. I will never look at evince the same way again.

I had a similar reaction when properly using the awesomebar in firebox 3 for the first time.

Update After seeing the comment below from Mr X, I checked evince with a few more PDFs and unfortunately evince wasn't doing OCR in real time. The text is embedded in the PDF. Maybe one time this will be possible. Any evince developers reading, please consider this a feature request.

I am still impressed with evince, just a little less impressed than I was.