Tag: Programming

Edit (2024-07-08): We have written a new post to expand on this one. Check it out here.

Edit (2024-06-26): As of Gaia Sky 3.6.3, the procedural generation process has been moved to the GPU. Even though the base method is the same, a number of things have changed from what is described here. For instance:

• The generation is now almost instantaneous, even with high resolutions.
• Gradval and Value noise are no longer available.
• Voronoi and Curl noise are now available.
• The process takes into account a temperature layer.
• We have introduced terraces, with the respective parametrization.

I have recently implemented a procedural generation system for planetary surfaces into Gaia Sky. In this post, I ponder about different methods and techniques for procedurally generating planets that look just right and explain the process behind it in somewhat detail. This is a rather technical post, so be warned. As a teaser, the following image shows a planet generated using the processes described in this article.

When I started using git as my VCS I skimmed the docs and git-bisect caught my eye. I got acquainted with it rather quickly and have been using it regularly ever since. git-bisect is a little handy git sub-command typically used to quickly narrow down the commit where a bug was introduced in a code base. It uses a simple binary search tree algorithm (BST) to test out different revisions by parting the remaining search space in half.

Do you often find yourself using “New feature”, “More” or similar short, useless and generic strings as your git commit messages? I know I did. Until I learned about semantic commit messages, that is. What are they and how can they exponentially improve your commit history and make it actually useful? I’m discussing it in this post.

It is nowadays commonplace to upload your valued photos to online services that don’t respect your rights like Flickr, Google Photos or Instagram. While these sites have a social component that may help you build an audience and have a wider reach, usually their terms and conditions are abusive to end users. In this post I’ll be discussing how to create your own static HTML photo gallery that you can host on your website using thumbsup, a static gallery generator written in Python that produces totally customizable photo galleries. You can host your high resolution photos in your private server and have the gallery link to them. The photo gallery on this very site is generated using this method.

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about my Linux setup at the time. Well, understandably a lot of things have changed since then, and instead of updating a two year old post, I think writing a new one from scratch with the same principle and using the same template makes more sense. It is always fun to go back and read these old posts, and I fully expect that this one post will be as enjoyable for me in a few years time.

I’ve written about the CHIP-8 machine before. It is a very simple interpreted programming language that can be implemented without much hassle by anyone interested in getting their feet wet with emulators. It is commonly regarded as the “hello world” of emulators.

Some time ago I decided to implement a CHIP-8 emulator in Rust as my second project written in that language. My first foray into the language was the porting of the Gaia Sky LOD catalog generation tool from Java. This allowed us to substantially increase the generation speed and dramatically (really) decrease the memory consumption of the processing, to the point where a processing that previously needed more than 2 TB of RAM could now be done with less than a hundred gigs. Back to the topic at hand, I called my implementation rchip8 (very creative). This post describes the process and structure of such an emulator with more or less detail.