Teddy.fr

Jumping the Great Firewall of China

I've recently spent a few weeks in France, and even if I usually end up realizing why I left Europe (I won't develop further more here), there is one thing I really enjoy while out of China; you can actually access what you want on the Internet, furthermore with a decent speed. I spend 99% of my time at work (and a huge portion of my free time as well) on the Web, developing, testing, uploading, and China sure is not the sweetest place for my kind. Well, enough whining, what are the actual solutions if you want to bypass Chinese censorship? Follow me... Read more »

A good development stack, at least one that works - Part 1

Back in the day, when I was a young and furless geek to be, I was relying on Notepad, my FTP client and EasyPHP. How foolish I was then... Well, if was still using just those tools, I would deserve spending the rest of my days patching Windows ME, but for the last few years I have been constantly improving my development process, at least I hope so. It is pretty common to find discussions about what kind of tools developers use, but I rarely, if ever, found anybody describing its whole development stack, from one end to another. Well, here I go... Read more »

Google launches SMS search in China

Google recently launched its SMS search service in China. By sending an SMS to 999333 1069999333 you can now access a huge amount of information; venues addresses, weather forecasts, translation tools... Read more »

How to serve big files through PHP

There are many reasons why you could be led to serve files though an application server: let's say for example you want to restrict the access of certain files to the registered users of your website (like the latest private pictures of Tabatha Big Bolts), every time somebody wants to display or download those files you must check that this somebody is logged in your site. The quick and simple way of doing that would be: Read more »

Online maps in China: an introduction to Mapbar API

For the last month, I have been playing with several of the existing online maps providers in China and I hardly found any English documentation available, neither on the official websites nor from individuals. Given that Mapbar has English maps of several Chinese cities, I thought some of you may be interested in learning how to display their maps on your website. For the impatients, below is a link to the demo. Read more »

The basics of Web design

I quite regularly got questions from people about the way to design a website: don't get me wrong, I am not a professional Web designer, I mean I am not dedicated to Web design. I do love it, and I do think I have some (modest) skills, but I am an engineer before anything else.

Anyway, people still ask me about Web design and I am going to try to explain what are the few basic steps that get me to the kind of final result you can see right now: Read more »

Online maps in China: ni yao qu na li?

Since I started working for my current company, I have been dreaming of being able to deploy a Google-like map that would allow me to present our listings of venues in a more comprehensive way. Well, as for many other things in China, things are not simple. Read more »

One year of hibernation...

Oh yeah, one full year! One year without the slightest change on this website; no blog post, no comment (except for ads for blue pills and other libido enhancers), no nothing. And you know what? I don't feel ashamed at all.

The truth is that I have been working like hell, 6 to 7 days a week, even on holidays, and I hope it was worth it. When you have spent the whole day building websites for other you don't especially feel the need to do the same for yourself. But I am still alive and I am ready to finally use this website for its original purpose: post my pictures and projects, and maybe geek big time. Who knows, I may be able to post more than once a month. Read more »

Wikipedia mon amour

You can not imagine what it represents for me : 2 weeks ago, while browsing a website about GIS (don't bother, geek stuff), I unconsciously clicked on a link which was supposed to lead me to the Wikipedia definition of another barbarian acronym. While realising I was redirected to Wikipedia, I started thinking I should close the current thumbnail. However I was not fast enough and something weird happened : I actually reached Wikipedia. I checked that I was not using a proxy service, and finally had to admit that Wikipedia was (at least for the moment) unblocked from China. Read more »

小熊爱Drupal - when a bear meet a drop

I publicly admit my love for this little blue drop : DRUPAL ROCKS !

You may now wonder what the hell is Drupal ; it is a CMS based on the well known PHP/MySQL couple. I have been using it for about a year now on this website and I never had the opportunity to really dig in it ; the basic functionalities where more than enough, and even these are already numerous. The basic install of Drupal provides you with blogs (and its API), forums, a search engine, tagging, URL-Rewriting, logs and statistics... But everything is deactivated so that you really choose what you need and nothing more. Moreover the code is clean, well documented and leave no room for creepy crappy modules which break your design. Read more »