Update: They were rather quick to get the streams back on! Now that they are up, let’s make them known.

Update 2 : Apparently, I’m being told that it was possibly a real technical problem.  I might have jumped to conclusions considering that I’ve never been able to access their Audio/video section on Linux.

Update 3: The service is officially down.  Radio-Canada replied to us that they only provide the [non-free] Microsoft Windows Media streams from now on.

For many years, Radio-Canada (Canada’s BBC in French), was streaming 2 of their radio stations in Ogg Vorbis.  Some 2 months ago, I discovered that the Espace Musique stream had been stopped but I didn’t bother to call then since I barely listened to it.  But today, they shut down the Première chaîne stream, which leaves me without any local news.  That’s enough.

They even erased the page mentioning that such streams ever existed: Radio-Canada.ca.  I’ve already sent a “technical error report” on their web site.  You may do so too here Rapport d’incident technique (only in French).  Here is what you should submit (in French too, since they only broadcast in French, copy/paste will do):

J’étais sur la page: http://ms2.radio-canada.ca/

Je voulais: Écouter vos flux Ogg Vorbis sous Linux.

Il s’est produit ceci: Vous avez interrompus vos flux.  Je ne peux donc plus écouter Radio-Canada sans briser des lois (c’est à dire installer illégalement les codecs WMA sur mon ordinateur pour écouter vos flux WMA).

Nom: <Your name>

Courrier électronique: <Your email>

I’ve also wrote an email to the team responsible for the web site as I’ve been suggested by the person who helped me when I called them.  Their Audio/vidéo section is heavily not Linux friendly, let’s not let it slip anymore!

Every fix doesn’t call for a blog post, but this one deserves it.  It all started when Jonathon Jongsma found a way to make text disappear in QtWebKit on May 27th.  So he raised a bug.  He and I started working on fixing it.  We rapidly found that WebKitGtk was also affected, but it was unreproducible on the Mac port.

We dove into the code: “grep selection”, GraphicsContext::drawText(), Font::drawText()… but nothing was really different (there) in the Qt or Gtk port which could explain why the text wasn’t being redrawn when changing the selection.

That’s when I discovered git bisect.  Since we had established that the bug wasn’t there when QtWebKit was snapshot for Qt 4.4.0, I had a good place to start.  So after recompiling QtWebKit some 15 times (yes, it took around 3 work days!), it pointed me to this changeset.  Lucky for us, it was related to the bug (text rendering).

After some digging into the patch, I contacted the author, Dan Bernstein at Apple, and we looked at it together.  In little time, he was able to find how to reproduce it on the Mac too.  This was now a WebKit wide bug!  Some back traces later and some trials: we came up with this fix. Pretty simple, isn’t it?  barely 16 chars.  Yet, these 16 chars cost around 1200$* in direct labour time and 3 engineers were involved.

Some will say this could have been prevented with proper tests.  It happens that it was a special case on the Mac, but all other ports always went through it.  Dan now added a pixel test.

The morals of the story are:

• bug fixing is costly (haven’t we heard that in school?)
• you never know when someone will hunt you back about your patch
• git is a cool beast (in fact, it just convinced me to use it)

One question lasts: how come it took over a month and a half before someone found it?

* This number is based on market mean hourly rate since exact rates are unknown

Side note on the WebKit party

It was really cool to get to San Francisco and finally meet IRL other WebKit devs.   Kudos for the event!

With my D40 and my N810 in hand, we went for a walk on the Mount Royal, Montréal’s Central Park. I knew what I wanted to do with my pictures, but I didn’t check how to do it before leaving. I only figured it should be important to synchronise my digital camera and my GPS. I also set Maemo Mapper to track our route.

Six hours and 80 pictures later, I was back home. I used gpscorrelate to put the GPS position in the EXIF information of my pictures. I was surprised, it was quite easy to do since Maemo Mapper produces data in gpx format.

After some search on the Web, I found that I have to activate this before importing my geotagged images into flickr. I put my pictures online with postr and voilà: see the map.

Once that was done, I knew I could do more with the GPS data. I exported it to a CSV file using gpsbabel and imported it into OpenOffice to generate charts. Here is what I got: