After some seven long years of working on my Ph.D. off-the-clock and three extensions, about a month ago I finally submitted my thesis to the doctoral office for review. I started back in 2015 when I had no kids. Today, I have two kids and 3 peer-reviewed papers on top visualization journals (and an unpublished one).

It has been an interesting ride indeed. For now, I can relax for a few weeks until the examination date is set.

In these last few days I have merged a huge internal refactoring into Gaia Sky’s master branch. This refactoring has been cooking for several months and has adapted or completely replaced virtually every piece in the code base. Read on if you want to know more.

In their own words, taken from the docs, “Codeberg is a democratic community-driven, non-profit software development platform operated by Codeberg e.V. and centered around Codeberg.org, a Gitea-based software forge.”. Essentially, it is a non-profit platform run on donations for sharing free and open source software by providing a collaborative VCS environment based on Gitea. One good day I decided to move all my open source repositories from GitLab over to Codeberg, and that includes the hosting of this very website. This is the story of this migration.

From time to time I profile Gaia Sky to find CPU hot-spots that are hopefully easy to iron out. To do so, I launch my profiler of choice and look at the CPU times for the top offender methods. Today I went through such a process and was surprised to find a forEach() method of the Java streams API among the worst offenders. Was the forEach() slowing things down or was it simply that what’s inside the loop took too long to process? I found conflicting and inconsistent reports in the interwebs, so I set on a quest to provide my own answers.

Wayland is a modern display server protocol that will eventually replace X11. It is still not quite a hundred percent there, but it has been improving steadily and gaining ground over the past years. It is expected to become the new default display server on Linux systems at some point in the near future… Whatever near means in that context.

This past weekend I had some time to play around with Sway, a window manager and Wayland compositor that mimics i3. How did it go?

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.