It’s lucky for me to find this backdoor as there must be some programming error leading to the crash. There is no reason for China Unicom to show up when a user is importing account information of a totally irrelevant service. The only explanation is that it's trying to steal the data. But what's the motive?
ShadowsocksR is a VPN technology that can be used to falsify data streams. China Unicom is probably using this backdoor to capture those who are using ShadowsocksR to get free cellular data.
No matter what its purpose is, this is an act totally ignorant of user privacy, and apparently illegal. The ShadowsocksR configuration it’s been trying to steal contains user account information like account names and passwords. Who knows what other information it might be stealing secretly?
The final object is to make something fantastic, while creating a workflow including techniques of 3D scanning, parametric modeling, robotic arm operations, 3D printing and bio-mechanical knowledge.
While breaking down the final object, Yasaman and I found our interest in the parametric modeling part. With instructions from Professor Simon, we began our quest to develop a robot-printing friendly curve generation algorithm. To be robot-printing friendly, the curve generated should have the following features:
Artistic (subjective)
Reasonably structured (objective)
As continuous as possible so that saves the trouble of reconnecting during printing (objective)
Modeling
Base shape
With the conclusion that we’re to use elastic canvas for basic form-finding, the first step of our modeling would be simulating this process. Several opinions are available:
Use finite element method to find the exact shape of the canvas under loading
Use Kangaroo to simulate the physical process
Use minimal surface
The minimal surface method is dropped due to the fact that we are to use form-finding in reality. The FEA method, despite exact and promising, does not go well with the rest of the project with its model format. Considering that the modeling precision would not be a big issue in this step, Yasaman and I decided to use Kangaroo for base shape simulation.
The drawback of Kangaroo is that we can hardly define an isotropic elastic material. The Quadrilateral Mesh, despite simple and straightforward, promises the same modulus only in the orthogonal direction of the mesh UV basis.
Through careful modeling, I add another restriction at 45° and 135° of the UV basis, making it closer to an isotropic material. Considering the exact model are to be found out using real form-finding and 3D-scanner, the remaining error is neglected.
20200501 Base Shape
Structural reasonableness
Considering the problem to be print on the basic form, several ideas of curve generation have been proposed. One plan is to adopt optimized principle stress lines. The advantage is obvious, as such a structure would be very reasonable under loading. However, principal stress lines turned out hard to be adopted. The continuity of the principle stress line does not guarantee the well-distribution of these lines, which often leaves large holes in structure generated. Due to the high sensitiveness to shape and load, the principal stress lines are hard to manipulate too. Consequently, we decided to start from the curve generation itself.
Curve generation
Step 1. Curve generated according to force distribution
One way of curve generation is to divide and lengthen parts of a continuous curve, while keeping the curve away from intersecting with itself, which defines all the goals we need to implement this idea with Kangaroo:
Lengthen curve sections
Prevent curve from intersecting with itself
To adapt the generated curves responsive to structural behavior, it's natural to densify the area with large stress, which gives the third goal:
Curve distribution responsive to stress distribution
With these goals the curves are successfully generated, meeting all our objective goals. Further development should focus on the subjective part, aka the artistic effects.
20200501 Step 1
Step 2. Curve generated freely
To gain more control of the curve generation, some restrictions have to be dropped. Now take a look back at the initial three goals, if we neglect the curve distribution requirement, we can achieve something looks very alike Zaha’s project.
20200501 Step 2
Recall that Zaha’s project uses a manually defined base curve to approximate initial stress distribution, we now certainly have a better solution: to use the curve generated in 1st step as the base shape for 2nd step, which gives us the following result.
20200501 Step 12
Step 3. Combination
There is an infinite number of curves we can generate by tweaking with all the parameters, and an even larger infinite number of combinations with different layer position, tube thickness, color, etc. For a quick example, this is what it will look like if we combine Step 1+2 as a thicker base layer and Step 2 as a thinner decoration layer.
20200501 Step 3
Conclusion
The curve generation is a complex workflow not fully automated, as lots of attention needs to be paid to calibrate all the parameters in order to get the best shape. All generated curves have the potential to become the final project, with a combination of each other and further improvement based on printing practice.
Due to the virus situation nowadays, it’s becoming harder for our project to be actually constructed. I hope all these quests into curve generation can be preserved, developed, and applied in future practice.
A story about a boy trying to prove himself a citizen with unconditional civil rights, and a distant relative (his great-great-grandpa) trying to get a visitor visa through him.
Family ties ARE important. For sure. Gracias, señor Trump.
Evidence of your employment and/or your family ties may be sufficient to show the purpose of your trip and your intent to return to your home country.
MATLAB LiveScript can be exported into pdf but the function is often broken. Sometimes figures are too large to stay in page frame, or it doesn't show figures at all.
To bypass this broken feature one possible way around is to save as HTML, and edit CSS to make sure things look normal before finally printing it into PDF.
There's something. A lot of people don't know this: George Washinton's brother was the uncle of our country.
Tell that to your kid. Tell him to tell his teacher that. He'll be home way before three o'clock.
Samuel Washington (November 27, 1734 [O.S. November 16, 1734] – September 26, 1781) was a colonial American officer and politician who was the brother of United States PresidentGeorge Washington.
I finally got my hands on Dynamo trying to model a parametric triangular sphere, which I have done several weeks earlier in Grasshopper. Convinced by Zhekai Li that Dynamo would perform better since it has advantage over complex modeling situation, I started from scratch to learn Dynamo. And 2 days later, eureka!
20200124110448-Triangular-Sphere-Dynamo
So let's come back to the topic: how does it feel to model something in Dynamo comparing with Grasshopper?
I finally decided to participate in the trip after 1 minutes' 'careful' consideration. It would be such a pity if I didn't take a tour around LA when I am living so close to it - only 381.9 miles away, especially with the Airbnb already booked and trip planned ahead by someone else. After all what could go wrong? Everthing
Ma, K., and Xiao, Y. “General Parametric Design of a Steel-Glubam Hybrid Space Truss.” In Modern Engineered Bamboo Structures: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Modern Bamboo Structures (ICBS 2018), June 25-27, 2018, Beijing, China, 1st ed., 223–29. CRC Press, 2019.
K. Ma
Zhejiang Univ.-Univ. of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Institute, Jiaxing, Zhejiang, China
Y. Xiao
Zhejiang Univ.-Univ. of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Institute, Jiaxing, Zhejiang, China
Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China
Department of Civil Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
ABSTRACT: This paper introduces a parametric design method for a hybrid truss system composed of glued laminated bamboo (glubam) and steel. Experiments on determining material’s physical and mechanical parameters were carried out first, on basis of which design stages from modeling, analysis, optimization to manufacturing are all rendered possible through parametric ways by defining corresponding parameters within one single platform - Grasshopper. By maximizing automation during the process, efficiency and extensibility are taken into consideration for possibly further, larger, and more complex design.
A structural lab that is clean is not a good lab.
-- Khalid M. Mosalam on CE 249, Sept. 6, 2019
edit 20220801:
The ZJU Haining campus recruited a new Civ Lab engineer recently, who is dedicated to make the Civ lab 'as clean and beautiful as a museum'. He once proposed that wood cutting should be done outside of the Lab to minimize the noise and ash, and I had to call the Dean in to revert this policy.
With his help everyting is now put in order far away from its supposed working location, just we can not find things when we need, and the lab engineer has no idea too.
Encountered 'This extension is already installed to all applicable products.' error when trying to install 'NewGrasshopperTemplate.vsix' to vs2019.
Open vsix as zip, update all '.json' files by replacing [15.0,16.0\)` with `[15.0,17.0\)
And it worked.
Concrete is something not often linked to boat, let alone dragon boat. Traditional concept of concrete based building material is embedded deeply not only in common folks but also in Civil Engineering students.
Concrete, usually Portland cement concrete (for its visual resemblance to Portland stone), is a composite material composed of fine and coarse aggregate bonded together with a fluid cement (cement paste) that hardens over time
Still, concrete is just a material, and material evolves as scientific progress advances. New material such as FRP rebars show even better performance than traditional steel rebars. Moreover, as its Chinese name indicated, concrete is just 'some sort of ash mixed and hardens', expanding its concept to a even higher dimension. Comparing to traditional boat building material, concrete has its own pros and cons.
Pros:
Stain proof (v.s. steel)
Flexible shape (v.s. timber)
Economical (v.s. steel and timber)
Cons:
Heavier than water and timber
Brittle
Low tensile strength
The whole project is aimed at exploiting the advantages of concrete while fixing its problems, expanding our knowledge of concrete through engineering practice.
Prototype 1.x - The First FRP Concrete Dragon Boat
Goal
A new type of boat construction method is proposed firstly by Prof. Yan Xiao. The basic idea is to use a self-hardening FRP cloth material as both concrete model and structural part that provides tensile strength.
20190615 Prototype 1.x Cross Section
Material
FRP Clothes
This is some material recently become popular for its ability of free shaping and fast hardening. Most common scenario of usage is replacement of medical bondage and plaster, or electrical wire joint protection. The mechanism is really simple as it's just piece of FRP soaked into glue. Exposition to air solidify the glue in several minutes, providing the structure with some strength.
Things become interesting when several layers of such kind of material are glued together. As FRP clothes is extremely strong in tensile direction, even glue can sustain the relatively less strong shearing force, guaranteeing high bending and shearing strength.
Plastic Hull
A plastic hull is needed for this model, primarily for the shape control of the self-hardening FRP clothes. To achieve better dynamic performance, hull is modeled to be smooth and continuous - NURBS interposition of key points. Therefore, 3D-printing technology is adopted for precise realization of the model.
20190406 3D Printing20190223 Modal Boat Hull20190317 Modal Boat Covered by FRP with Kaihang Zhang
Concrete
ECC concrete is a new kind of concrete which includes PVA fiber to increase its tensile strength and crack resistance. Ingredients are listed as below:
Cement
1
Quartz Sand 20-40
1.1
Silica Fume
0.3
Flyash
0.15
Mineral Powder
0.1
Quartz Sand 325
0.1
PVA Fiber
Water
0.18
Water Reduce Agents
0.10%
Early Strength Agents
0.10%
Next Stage
Prototype 1.x focuses itself on boat construction. A boat floating on the water marked success of the first stage. On that occasion, however, path splits for two different prototypes though.
Prototype 2.x stays small and is optimized for wireless remote control. A concrete dragon boat (model) competition is later held based on this. Prototype 3.x is develped with optimization for man-powered sailing in a much larger scale - a real concrete dragon boat.
Prototype 2.x - ICDBC 2019
Goal
Fast, stable, swift steering
To make it fast, the boat has to be speed boat alike, narrow, and light. The concrete layer needs to be as thin as possible. For sure, boat surface still needs to be smooth and continuous.
To make it stable and swift steering, the boat has to be not that narrow in width, motors parallel to each other and as far away as each other as possible.
Should have made it clear that theme color can be switched.
Should have designed certificate templates.
Next stage
Should have adopted Arduino.
20190606 ICDBC Boat of My Team20190606 ICDBC Jury Committee with Boats20190606 ICDBC Prof. Yan Xiao20190606 ICDBC Everyone
Prototype 3.x - The Great Dragon Boat
Goal
Strong, stable, light
The large boat is very different from the small boat as construction method can not be inherited directly. It is too slow for the hull to be 3d-printed out. Instead, EPS foam slices cut by CO2 laser are glued (or tied) up to form the basic model of the boat. A FRP clothes layer is then put on the foam, then concrete with FRP bars inside.
20190526 Laser Cut Plastic Foam
To make the boat strong, the boat is modeled even more smooth, to the extent that FRP rebars can be put inside the concrete from head to tail without cut or connect. Such smooth shape without any edge can be regarded as a 2-d arch, making the most of the compressive strength of the concrete. To make the boat stable, the boat should have a lower gravity center.
20190615 Prototype 2.x Cross Section20190531 Great Dragon Boat Foam and Dr. Dade Lai20190601 Great Dragon Boat Covered by Concrete20190604 Great Dragon Boat under Painting20190606 Great Dragon Boat
Next stage
Should have the whole boat hull made by solid EPS form.
Should have adopted sprayed concrete technique.
Should have used more PVA.
Should have used more FRP fiber clothes.
Credit
Instructor
Yan Xiao 肖岩
Boat Designer, Engineer, Manufacturer, Website Programmer and Designer
Ke Ma 马克
Construction
Ke Ma 马克, Dade Lai 赖大德, Zhiwei He 贺智伟
Also thanks for help by
Anqi Tan 谭安琪, Yiqi Feng 冯亦奇, Kaihang Zhang 张开航, Zhekai Li 李哲楷, Mengjun Wang 王梦君, Guoli Wang 汪郭立, Yang Zhou 周洋, Shangchun Jiang 江上春, Cristoforo Demartino, Zicheng Bao 包梓成
Decoration by
Jiahui Liang 梁嘉惠, Ke Ma 马克, Sicheng Zhou 周思成, Anqi Tan 谭安琪, Qingyun Liu 柳青云
Concrete Recipe
Bo Shan 单波, Dade Lai 赖大德
Logistic Support by
Sicheng Zhou 周思成
Competition Rule Maker
Yan Xiao 肖岩, Ke Ma 马克, Yiqi Feng 冯亦奇, Anqi Tan 谭安琪, Kaihang Zhang 张开航
Activity Organizer
Hang Wu 吴行, Ke Ma 马克, Binbin Li 李宾宾, Yanlong Xie 谢焱龙, Sichen Zhou 周思成, Tao Li 李涛, Jiahui Liang 梁嘉惠, Zhiwei He 贺智伟, Dade Lai 赖大德, Haixiang Zhu 朱海翔, Yi Zhang 张旖, Chenchen Ye 叶晨晨, Qian Yu 余倩, Jinyan Yu 俞静琰, Fengqing Jiang 江凤清 and other volunteers from ZJUI
Stress does not get the better of me, but sense of responsibility does. I am accustomed to be alone, still, sense of loneliness and isolation horrified me.
People like me do not climb to leading position due to their ability to lead people, but as a result of responsibility and judgement. Team members may not believe the leader's judgement, but they do rely on it - as long as the leader shoulder all the responsibility, they are happy with it. Such ultra unstable system will collapse as soon as any mistake happens, especially those out of control, either by the leader himself, or by some team member - doesn't matter - team members will soon lose their interest or hope to fix the problem. And mistake is almost definitely to come around.
Problem originates from the responsibility system. Students who I lead, most come to the project with just out of curiosity, or even unwillingness. They have nothing beneficial from me, nor threatened by any power from me. The only reason they follow my order, is out of trust, that I could make sure that the problem be solved at the lowest cost of their time and work.
So the 'solution' is clear now. Under such condition, best solution is to assign tasks and orders as simple as possible to everyone and let them believe that this is the best way that they could get away from this, after they finish their part. Sadly, machine is always stronger than people in terms of obeying orders.
First rule of leadership: PICK the right team member.
Shot on my way back to office after dinner, in Zhejiang University International Campus, Haining, Zhejinag, China.
The flying object was flying with a tail of fixed length, generally from South to North, to the West of the campus.
Video shot with my phone, stabilized by Ae and is speeded up to 10 times.
Given the almost horizental track, and the fact that there's no smoke behind, there's high possibility that the object was moving at high altitude.
https://www.ibcc2019.org
My first commercial web project, fully by myself. Experience from building up my own blog made great contribution, and the whole project was finished in less than 3 days (the most important parts).
I guess I can now call myself a full-stack designer now. Well, there's still architecture out there...
Credit to all the developers who paved the road for me. Thanks to all IBCC organization committee members (Kewei Liu, Zhi Li, Tao Li, Jinyuan Zhang, et.al.)
And guess who designed its logo : )
http://tam251.intl.zju.edu.cn/people.html(LAN Access Only)
It's been like a decade since I was designated as a class president or such sort of things. Still, I feel honoured. It's a fun fact that most of the TAM 251 website is edited by me (revised from UIUC), as years of playing with html, servers, etc. finally get me on the course 🙂
Last time I was soaked in with Solid Mechanics, I scored 94 out of 100. To me, it's almost the most interesting Mechanics subject I learned (comparing with structual mechanics and others). The point is, it's a theory-based subject for scientific research rather than an experience-based one for practical engineering. That means fun for me.
- How did I get married?
Did I ever learned to play the mandolin?
Who was to living at the end of Game of Thrones?
- OMG I forgot u haven't seen it yet!
So, Cersei and John Snow...
Planet Money #872: The Hallowing Tapes
Polylang redirects to home page when it's not able find a translation for current page. Following code will enable it to stay on the same page but still to update the language cookie.
From the first stirring of life beneath water, to the great beast of Stone Age, to man taking his first upright steps, we have come far. All of the progress instilled these two seemingly paradoxical characteristics into mankind: competition and cooperation. Species without competition will surly lose its dominating position soon, and a single man can never protect himself from any physically overwhelming animal. Thousands of years later, these two inherited features still play important roles in modern society regardless of fundamentally massive change within human society itself. We have long evolved from cave Australopithecus to intelligent man who stands on the top of the food chain, and the importance of competition and cooperation shall be rebalanced.
There is a live video platform in China called Douyu who offers virtual currency gambling, from which I find out a very interesting phenomenon - the return rates always stay low, i.e. on specific conditions when the outcome is a random event (50% chance on each side), the return rates always stay below 1 (often 0.1 - 0.7) on both sides, rendering it unfair for any gamblers who pays - take it or not.
Finally, I decide to give up iOS, despite having using it for so many years. When I began to use iOS on 2011, it's still far less mature than today. People jailbroke it for better UI and more features. I can still remember some of the classic debian packages, i.e. SBSettings which iOS later introduced as Control Center. Good days back then.
With Apple constructing its firewall taller and harder, jailbreaking is becoming much more difficult nowadays, not only for hackers, but also for common geeks. I'm not here to comment on the righteousness of Apple's action to promoting this. Objectively, fewer users means fewer developers, then fewer apps to serve even fewer users. To begin with, after iPhone 4s, iOS users can no longer freely downgrade their devices even one wants to enjoy fluency of earlier version. Year after year, the limits just became stronger and stronger. It finally leads to the collapse of jailbreaking community. A lot of cydia apps began to lose maintaince after iOS 9.
I have my iPhone se locked at iOS 9.3.3 to keep it working fluently for 2 years. And after this only 2 years, with the screen malfunctioning, infra-red sensor no longer working, cameras poulluted by ashes and speakers making noises, it's high time I decided to move away from iOS, from Apple. (I'm a bit too objective here. What I am truly thinking, F**k Apple.)
I choose to move on, and hope I can find some lost freedom from the Android world.
Non-commercial project for research and demo purpose.
Project Introduction
This project is based on the 1st-prize-winning project 'RE Frame' of the Bamboo Pavilion Competition in Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria by Stefano Vitale and his team. It's an honor to join him in such a great project. All following are based on my own understanding of the project.
After being continuously locked up by GFW for a whole week I decide to change my site into a real https site.
Given the fact that I can only use port 80 and 443 for all the activities across GFW, I have to make port 443 for both nginx and ShadowsocksR (for scurity reason).
Thus, ssr will divide the inbound packages into two parts, one for itself and another redirected to port xxx for nginx, as following.
Programming Assignment 1: Percolation
Algorithms, Part I
Princeton University
Write a program to estimate the value of the percolation threshold via Monte Carlo simulation.
With Chrome extension, user-defined protocol and Windows API integrated in C#, the auto-look-up process when reviewing words on Shanbay can be even more cost-efficient and precise comparing with former methods.
The trip has two parts. One from June 21st to 23rd, and the other from June 28th to July 2ed. I spend the gap between the two parts in Beijing, for detail see my previous post.
I earned myself this trip to Beijing through my dissertation, with Lin Runze's help. To someone who has already graduated, it was such a surprise that I even don't have time to prepare my suit.
Despite the fact that I was working almost the same as a free apprentice, I saw and learned a lot.
Before discussing how to promote bamboo industry you’ll have to inspire people how they can benefit from it – especially their superior renewability comparing to trees. In most south America countries, bamboo is still considered as a type of tree which means that they will have to be registered for being cut down, and the register process could last 3-6 months which is almost insane for modern commercial activities.
Moreover, rather than inspiring the youth of the innovation of bamboo structure, it’s better to have them inspire us.
To replace Eudic with GoldenDict for better responding speed, better extensibility, better and more flexible UI, free of charge, and less stability issues.
To scale the page up for precise control while formerly forbidden.
To scale the page down for better UI (and sometimes extra options) by simulating a larger screen.
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in"
— Douglas Adams, So long, and thanks for all the fish
Note that the book was published in 1984. And 32 years later the competition actually began with the same feeling, "Who's worse?" I doubt this has ever happened in the whole U.S. history.
Anyway it's not the right time to discuss any serious topic. Just enjoy the nonesence cause I couldn't help laughing even when it was 2 a.m. and all my roommates were in dream.
It's been 2 years since the first time I thought of building an online order system for 工E设计, the Gong E Design Studio.
Two years ago when I was the chairman of 工E设计, I received orders from all over the campus with different types and requirements. It would have been a mess if I did't manage all the orders with a calendar to remind myself of the deadline. Simple work, but quite annoying, especially when you get quite a lot of messages without a general form to regulate the styles - actually I did try to regulate, and wrote a well composed docx file, on the basis of some former chairman's work. Even then it was too much information to type into a calendar so I end up adding only the title and deadline to the calendar. By then the idea had emerged to have a automatic system developed.
I don't speak Chinese. But I speak three languages, Chemical, Mathematical and Geometrical language. These are the common languages.
— Brian A. Murray, Nanjing Tech-ITT Bilateral Workshop, Nanjing, Apr. 12th, 2018
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
— Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
It’s been five days since I decided to build this site on a boring Sunday afternoon. Now that almost everything feels good, and I think it’s time I paused and wrote something.
Original post on deeptimes.
以下内容均为本人凭记忆手打，如有出错遗漏欢迎各位大佬指出。
所有BUG基于原版(Vanilla)，因为修改版（Modified）作弊可以直接用脚本编辑器调出，不需要利用卡BUG这种低阶方式。所有列出的BUG不会导致Modified Tag。
鉴于LZ本人只玩过TC2.5, AP3.3, 所以下文的适用版本号都是凭印象给的，基本准(cuo)确(wu)。当然如果你看到了Lv.6-7, 你会发现神马版本号都是浮云。
20190628 Large Waste Transfer Station
20200811 Large Waste Transfer Station
20200815 Large Waste Transfer Station
20190324 Waste Transfer Station, by Y. Xiao, K. Ma
202001030925 Waste Transfer Station, Photo by S.C. Zhou
