Shanghai Food & Drink Haunts

For food

Chinese - Shanghai Cuisine

Rui Fu Yuan

[**___] Environment
[****_] Food
[   n/a  ] Drinks
[***__] Price
http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g308272-d1089911-Reviews-Rui_Fu_Yuan-Shanghai.html

Xiao Nan Guo

Chain restaurant, various locations
Example: Super Brand Mall (Zheng Da Square) branch
[***__] Environment
[****_] Food
[   n/a  ] Drinks
[**___] Price
http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g308272-d3450340-Reviews-Xiao_Nan_Guo_Super_Brand_Mall-Shanghai.html

Fu 1039

[*****] Environment
[*****] Food
[***__] Drinks
[*____] Price
http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g308272-d1195842-Reviews-Fu_1039-Shanghai.html

Jia Jia Tang Bao (Dumpling)

[*____] Environment
[****_] Food
[   n/a  ] Drinks
[***__] Price
https://rbjello.wordpress.com/2013/12/03/i-found-the-perfect-shanghai-soup-dumpling-at-jia-jia-tang-bao/

Japanese Cuisine

Roosevelt Ichiban, The House of Roosevelt (Ground Floor)

[****_] Environment
[****_] Food
[****_] Drinks
[**___] Price
http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g308272-d2416850-Reviews-The_House_of_Roosevelt-Shanghai.html

Wang Ding

[****_] Environment
[****_] Food
[***__] Drinks
[**___] Price
http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g308272-d3449185-Reviews-Wangding_Japan_Restaurant_Teppanyaki_Shimao_Shangdu-Shanghai.html

Soba Sho Mon Hyoe (Good for Ramen, Sake)

[***__] Environment
[****_] Food
[****_] Drinks
[***__] Price
http://www.timeoutshanghai.com/venue/Restaurants__Cafes-Asian-Japanese/7568/Soba-Sho-Mon-Hyoe.html

For drinks

Flair

[*****] Environment
[****_] Food
[****_] Drinks
[**___] Price
http://www.ritzcarlton.com/en/Properties/ShanghaiPudong/Dining/Flair/Default.htm

M1NT

[****_] Environment
[__?__] Food
[****_] Drinks
[**___] Price
http://www.m1ntglobal.com/club-shanghai

Shook!

[****_] Environment
[__?__] Food
[***__] Drinks
[**___] Price
http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g308272-d2089655-Reviews-Shook-Shanghai.html

For drinks and live entertainment

Xiao Hong Lou / Restaurant Martin

[*****] Environment
[****_] Entertainment
[__?__] Food
[****_] Drinks
[**___] Price
http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g308272-d2037806-Reviews-Restaurant_Martin-Shanghai.html

JZ Club

[****_] Environment
[****_] Entertainment
[   n/a  ] Food
[***__] Drinks
[***__] Price
http://www.jzclub.cn/en/aboutus

TZ House

[**___] Environment
[*****] Entertainment
[   n/a  ] Food
[***__] Drinks
[****_] Price
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Time-Zipping-House-Tz/284649701582635

Xin Tian Di

http://www.travelchinaguide.com/attraction/shanghai/xin-tian-di.htm
Example: Paulaner (mainly for beer lovers)
[****_] Environment
[__?__] Food
[*****] Drinks
[**___] Price
http://www.bln-restaurants.com/paulaner/xintiandi/

An unique open source HTTP server called Harp

What's Harp?

I have just published on GitHub an open source HTTP server called Harp. It's an active HTTP reverse proxy server, created specifically for developers and testers, with unique features such as serving random or queued response documents by URL.

This is currently at version 0.0.3 and in alpha. The server is written in Node.js as a technology trial.

Get it now!

Get it directly from Github at https://github.com/leonardw/harp.

Mac essential free software for developers

All run in OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion

Text editor

TextWrangler

Source: Mac App Store

• Syntax highlighting for various languages
• Multi tab
• Allows closing with unsaved files; recovers unsaved on opening

Utilities

JDiskReport

Source: http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/

• Graphical disk usage reporting

Flycut clipboard manager

Source: Mac App Store

• Multiple cut-and-paste

Compressed file manager

iPackr

Source:Mac App Store

• Supports zip, 7zip + many others
• Allows editing of compressed archive
• Allow extraction of individual files from compressed package

Graphics editor

Seashore

Source: http://seashore.sourceforge.net/The_Seashore_Project/Download.html

• Beginner friendly
• Mac native binary
• Supports PNG and transparency
• Based on GIMP

GIMP

Source: http://gimp.lisanet.de/Website/Download.html

• Full featured open source Photoshop replacement
• Lots of advanced editing features - can be overwhleming
• Requires X11 - see XQuartz below

FTP

FileZilla client

Source: http://filezilla-project.org/download.php?type=client

OSX development tools

Git version control

Source 1: Xcode:Command line tools (see Xcode below)
Source 2: Homebrew - gives more recent version (see below)

DiffMerge

Source: http://www.sourcegear.com/diffmerge/downloads.php

• Clean, effective UI
• Consistent cross-platform editions
• Diff two directories trees

Homebrew (*nix, GNU & application binaries)

Source: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

• Custom build, from source, all popular *nix tools not found in OSX
• Produces efficient native binaries
• Fast compile; tries to use native OSX dependencies where it can
• Requires X11 - see XQuartz below
• Requires OSX developement command line tools - see Xcode below

XQuartz (X Window System, X11)

Source: http://xquartz.macosforge.org

• THE official X11 for OSX

Xcode (OSX development suite)

Source: Mac App Store

• Provides gcc and other *nix toolchain (as optional install via Xcode>Preference>Downloads>Command line tools)

iPackr, fix for JAR, WAR, EAR, APK, and any other custom file extensions

As often is the case with freebies for the Mac OSX, they come half-baked, leaving you yearning for essential features that exist only in their commercial incarnation, obviously at a cost. For an enterprise web application developer, iPackr belongs in this category. Let's fix it!

iPackr claims to be a full-featured compressed archive manager, available free on the Mac App Store from developer Little Big Monster Inc. Rightly so, it is by far the best free compressed archive tool I have used on the Mac, and not your usual dumbed down decompressors such as Archive Utility.

iPackr, currently version 1.50 at time of writing, has not been updated for more than a year and a half. It works fine for the most part, until you need it to manage archive files of an unsupported filename extension, even if it uses a natively supported compression algorithm. Just associating an arbitrary extension to the iPackr app simply does not work.

The obvious workaround is to rename such a file to a supported extension, and put it back later when you are done using iPackr. Aside from this being a chore, it quickly becomes impractical if you need to do this regularly.

For an enterprise web application developer, one thing you may want to do is to look into JAR or WAR archives. These are no more than rebadged ZIP files. Unfortunately, these file extensions are not recognised in iPackr. An attempt at customising the file types association in its preferences settings achieves no satisfaction, which is counter-intuitive.

Similar complaints about this rather obvious feature omission in their official forum received no solution  or consolation other than a shameless plug that it is fixed in the paid-for version.

Out of frustration, I decided to fix it myself. Below is how I added JAR, WAR, EAR and APK support - all of which are just the ZIP archive format natively supported by iPackr.

1) Edit iPackr preference settings

Open iPackr, and go into Preferences.

Double-click the Extensions column next to the matching File Type "Zip Archive" and type in the new extensions prefixed with dot, and separated by semi-colon.

Here, I've added ";.jar;.war;.ear;.apk".

Close Preferences, and quit iPackr.

At this point, files with the new extensions are associated with iPackr. You may verify that with "Get Info" on such a file.

However, if we try to open this file, iPackr complains that it cannot be opened.

2) Manually edit configuration plist

Make sure iPackr is not running. Quit if it is.

Use a text editor with elevated superuser permission to manually edit iPackr's Info.plist configuration file. If you are using a GUI editor, you'll need to right-click and "Show Package Contents" on iPackr.app to navigate to the file in Finder.

Here, we just use command line in Terminal.

 sudo vi /Applications/iPackr.app/Contents/Info.plist  

Then add in the extra lines (highlighted in red, below) immediately below the existing "<string>zip</string>" entry.

 <dict>  
     <key>CFBundleTypeExtensions</key>  
     <array>
         <string>zip</string>
         <string>jar</string>
         <string>war</string>
         <string>ear</string>
         <string>apk</string>
     </array>
     <key>CFBundleTypeIconFile</key>  
     <string>zip</string>  
     <key>CFBundleTypeName</key>  
     <string>Zip Archive</string>  
     <key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>  
     <string>Editor</string>  
     <key>NSDocumentClass</key>  
     <string>ZipDocument</string>  
 </dict>  

Save, and close the file. We're done!

Now, if you try opening the archive file, iPackr will fire up automatically and open the file exactly as if it's just another ZIP archive.

Of course, this will work for any arbitrary extension that you may want iPackr to support, as long as the underlying compression algorithm is one that's natively supported, i.e., it's one of those listed under File Type in Preferences.

If the above is straying out of your geek comfort zone, or you simply prefer not to get your hands dirty, there is always the option of paying for its bigger brother iPack (notice the missing R at the end) which, allegedly, has the fix in place, plus other features. iPack is available on the Mac App Store.