Pierre-Luc Beaudoin

I am complete back in sync with my time zone now, I can write about GUADEC :)  It was my first GUADEC ever, and my second conf ever (the first being the excellent FOSDEM).  It was wonderful, I met lots of nice people and learned a lot.  The most promising projects I’ve seen were libcanberra (new sound library), Soylent and Banshee (I hadn’t tried the 1.0 release yet).

I seem to always be a bit depressed the first week after a conf.  As one of my fellow traveler said, it is as if we were in a summer camp for a week: living close, eating, traveling, doing all together… no wonder I feel a little depressed back home!

Istanbul was unbelievable.  It holds so much history, more than I even expected.  The food was exquisite, in all the restaurants I’ve been.   The language was too bad, given that I had a small handbook and barely left the tourist neighbourhood. I certainly plan to visit more of Turkey someday.  You can see my pictures here.

Now that I have a nice camera, I should display my pictures on my computer’s screensaver.  But I am unsatisfied with the current selection of photo screensaver.   So I though, there’s the Apple TV’s screensaver which is quite cool and allow a lot of pictures to be displayed at the same time, I should try to reproduice it.

Clutter came as a natural choice since I had already played with it back in the 0.2 days.  But I though that writing C was too much hassle for such project: I went with Python.

I did have difficulty to find documentation on how to get started at first.  After only some hours, I had a working version that provides reasonable performance and looks.

I don’t wish to recreate the whole scene rotation thing, but I am looking for help on improving it (add flickr support, better performance, turning it into an actual screensaver)!

So here is the code, GPLed: http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/pierlux/savr.git;a=summary

Have fun!  You can also come and see me to talk about it at GUADEC 2008, I will be there (I am actually already in Istanbul)!

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.

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:

Have a look at this NDP proposed bill C-552.  It is exactly what we need, right now. In this time of net throttling and censorship, we need law that will make it clear that every company or person’s data is equal on the network.

Ask your MP to support this bill!

Stated in the Adobe Labs - Flash Player 10 Beta Release Note, Flash 10 supports Ubuntu “OS”. But oh why do you only provide rpms or tar.gz as a mean to install it? lol

The Super Expciences Bell is the national final of regional ExpoSciences fares in Québec. At these fares, students from High School to CÉGEP (comes after High School in Québec) can present their scientific projects. Projects are reviewed and marked. The best ones are invited to travel to international sciences fares or to the Canadian final.

Going through the computer related projects and health projects that interested me, I have to admit the quality of the projects is surprisingly high. The following projects have retained my attention:

• a project describing the Chron Disease;
• a project describing Asthma;
• a chatbot project written completely in Javascript, and it was quite convincing (you can even try it on-line at http://www.seb-ia.fr.nf ;
• a project to improve text completion ofT9 capable phones;
• a multi-touch screen project with a unique user interface completely written in pigment.

As a former graduate student of the university hosting the fare (ie École de technologie supérieure) and active participant in a computer science industry, I’ve been invited to participate into the Future Dinner. It was the occasion for the students to meet with people from many industries and talk to them about their work. I’ve meet very enthusiast and dynamic persons. I’ve explained to them my personal life and how I ended up doing open source software. I hope I’ve been usefull in their process of choosing a career.

On the technical side: all the projects were created using open source tools and that was heart warming to see. To the eyes of the young, the future is open.

I bought myself a new digital camera a Nikon D40 since my old one (Canon A95) broke last week end. It is my first SLR and I have to admit: I like it! Wow, it’s like I never shot a picture before. The quality is so good and controls easy to access. This will make wonderful pictures next week in Dominican Republic

Not that I never made nice pictures before, until now I preferred to keep the pictures on my personnal site. With that camera, I guess it’ll take too much space. flickr comes in. I am surprised at how easy it is to use and the pro version is only 25$ per year. I mean: that’s all I need. You can see my pictures here or here.

Never the less, if Yahoo is ever bought by Microsoft, I will consider seriously deleting all my pictures.

Savoir Faire Linux has decided to go and sue the Gouvernement du Québec about their choice of Microsoft Windows Vista without a proper call for tenders. This is supposedly a first in North America, and I personally hope they do win.

The Gouvernement du Québec is a 100% Microsoft Windows installation as far as we can see. This could be great for the local businesses working in the domain. Switching to Linux could boost our economy by not sending 80 M$ straight away into the US.

Here is the French press release:

• RRQ/DA02481 - Requête en jugement déclaratoire à la Cour supérieure du Québec - La longue route du logiciel libre au Québec