Stop Talking, Start Doing - 停止空想，开始行动

How to design a board game, step by step

Tue, 27 Dec 2016 13:39:25 -0500

History

I always want to design a board game, but unfortunately, I have higher expectation on this design so that I can even finish one during these years. My dreaming work must be suit for both entertainment and competition, which both amateurs or pros can enjoy this game.

My first designed board game is “SimCity ~ Board version”. It was a great fun when I was in forth grade of elementary. Compare to a board game, it’s more like a paper-version web game. I offer everything include game design, a “database” (notebook) to record all players status. At beginning, it wasn’t that popular, but my classmates love it. With several weeks running, 30 players joined this silly game and students from other classes came for me to join my game. During three month testing, I released more than 120 new buildings, 15 new activities and even made this game payable. It sounds stupid, but lots of them rather pay 50 cents for accelerating their construction. I also faced competitors, but no one wants to play their bad designed game. At least for myself, I won’t spent players’ 20 hours for just a nuclear plant, offer them a lottery that every players whose level is up to 20 can get chance to win their own plants (Trust me, my lottery only have 0.01 chance that you win nothing, and anyone can get free tickets everyday and only pay 10 cents for a spare lottery ticket). Of course, my board game didn’t last for long. Before final weeks, I made a statement that game will closed. At the evening after statement, I wrote wealthy rank for all players to let all of them know who wins or lose.

This history always encourage me to design a new board game, but this time I am not facing to young boys and girls who don’t have too much to play at school. I admit this is a serious challenge to me but I’ll try my best to make this game fun to play.

My dream

Better for two players
Competitive
Do have fortune features, but good strategy can guarantee winning
Simple, better to be PnP (Print and Play)

Preparation

Warm-up

Island-Combat is my first idea. I designed it in Chinese, but you may free to guess what these figures mean.

Game Concepts

Develop Process

Freshman from china ~ 人生修复者

Wed, 23 Nov 2016 22:58:00 -0500

在题目上，我就厚着脸皮装了一次嫩。虽然这一年多的时间，每逢与人交谈，我总会以 Graduate Freshmen 自称。但是总感觉自己在一天一天的变得消沉和无趣。不知道成熟是何物的我试图一直保持自己乐观到单纯的性格，但随着保持时间的变长，我已然不知自己究竟是真的傻还是装的蠢了。一直与人无争的我终还是变得扭曲搬的“孤傲”了起来。

Some of my previews experiment works: 2016

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 12:27:33 -0400

This blog contains only some basic record of my works. For some details, I will write a unique blog just for some specific topics.

2016-10

Time Experiment of rsync

Patch is based on rsync with version 3.1.2. [Rsync|Patch]

How to collect data

Basically, everything of transmission time and computation time will be output with overall time will be printed on the console.
But we also need some bash script to collect data through different size of random size and with different modification through them.

Start from 8K to 64M, modify at beginning, [Bash script]
Start from 8K to 64M, modify at last, [Bash script]
Start from 8K to 64M, modify at random place with a (slow) python script, [Bash script|Python program]

Time Experiment of seafile

Patch is based on seafile 5.1.4. You can find the release from seafile official repo. You may follow official compile instructions from here. [Patch no longer avaiable, new version at following sections]

How to collect data

We also need everything be done using scripting. But this time I only design added some distance between two increasing files’ sizes.

Start from 8K to 16M, 4 times increasing, modify at beginning/ at 1024 different places with python script. [Bash Script|Python program]
After using this auto testing script, everything of output will be marked in log files of seafile, which located in ~/.ccnet/log/seafile.log
We need to use this simple awk code and vim operation to extract data.

# CDC: content defined chucks
# HUT: Http upload traffic
# ALL: overall time of one commit & upload
awk '/CDC|HUT|ALL/ {print $4,$5}' ~/.ccnet/log/seafile.log > results.stat

Install Seafile on odroid xu

Due to failure of my cross-compile to seafile on android. I used develop board as a replacement experiment platform for ARM-seafile testing. I used a odroid xu as hardware standard. Because all I need is an ARM platform, only an ARM-Ubuntu is enough for me. But develop prototype on a board is much fun than coding, I won’t address much this time. But I’ll start a blog telling some really cool stuff I made for a strange aim.

To install a ubuntu with GUI is my all preparation work. I found to way to do this.

armhf is a website for arm-based ubuntu. It has a detailed instruction to follow at here. They also provide ubuntu 12.04/ 14.04 and debian 7.5 to choose. But unfortunately odroid xu’s hdmi output doesn’t supported by ubuntu native firmware. So install ubuntu-desktop might can’t be boot up for video output.
Burn images is much easy to install a pre-complied ubuntu system. I found this on odroid xu’s forum, which contains xubuntu image [download] for odroid xu. With this image, you just need to use dd command to write whole system mirror into sdcard.

# If .img end with xz, use this command to uncompress first
unxz ubuntu-14.04lts-xubuntu-odroid-xu-20140714.img.xz    
# Burn image into SD-card
sudo dd if=ubuntu-14.04lts-xubuntu-odroid-xu-20140714.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M conv=fsync
sync

2016-11

Android Kernel

How to build an Android Kernel?

Generally, I won’t tell anything in this parts, just mark some related links, and point out some mistakes or error solutions.

Google Official Guide
– If you don’t have AOSP sources, you have to download prebuilt toolchains which recommended in this guide might not be correct. Use following links to choose your fitting tools.
— ASOP git root, under sub class “/platform/prebuilts/gcc”
Packing and Flashing a Boot.img [highly recommend]

2016-12

Android Kernel

How to compile with ftrace?

If we want to debug under android, ftrace is a great tool for working. But, ftrace is not available in android if we used default configure file. Android kernel configuration is in arch/arm64/kernel/configs. We need to add few lines under that.

CONFIG_STRICT_MEMORY_RWX=y
CONFIG_FUNCTION_TRACER=y
CONFIG_FUNCTION_GRAPH_TRACER=y
CONFIG_DYNAMIC_FTRACE=y
CONFIG_PERSISTENT_TRACER=y
CONFIG_IRQSOFF_TRACER=y
CONFIG_PREEMPT_TRACER=y
CONFIG_SCHED_TRACER=y
CONFIG_STACK_TRACER=y

How to extract android images: Dump an image

If we want to hold a rooted status after flashing boot, we need to extract an image from android devices. We can first use following command to find which blocks belongs to. According to some references, this article provide three ways to dump an image, I picked one for easy using.

adb shell
ls -al /dev/block/$SOME\_PLATFORM/$SOME\_DEVICE/by-name # {Partitions} -> {Device Block}

# dump file
su
dd if=/dev/block/mmcblk0p37 of=/sdcard/boot.img

Using charles proxy to monitor mobile SSL traffics

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 22:50:33 -0400

In this blog, I will generally talk about how to use proper tools to monitor SSL traffics of a mobile devices. Currently, I only can dealing with those SSL traffics which use an obviously certification. Some applications may not using system root cert or they doesn’t provide us a method to modify their own certs. For these situation, I still didn’t find a good solutions for it. But I’ll keep updating this if I get one.
My current solution is using AP to forward all SSL traffic to a proxy, charles proxy is my first choice (Prof asked). It’s a non-free software which still update new versions now. So mainly, I’ll talk about how to charles SSL proxy.

Preparations

Monitor device situation: Linux Machine with wireless adapter
Download the newest version(4.0.1) of charles
Target android devices with root privilege

Install Charles and Configuration

You have to install charles first. After downloading the charles proxy, you have to unzip it and configure some basic settings.

# open charles first
./bin/charles

Save charles’ private key and public key

In Help -> SSL Proxying -> Export Charles Root Certificate and Private Key, enter a password and save the public and private key in *.p12 format.
You also need to save charles Root Certificate, it also contains in the same menu. For convience, save it as *.pem format.

Set Proxy and SSL Proxy

Stop Talking is the worst title of one blog

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 22:50:33 -0400