Red Dot Fever
One of the first applications every GIS developer does is drawing red dots on a map. This is the "Hello World" equivalent of geo-information systems, and it's exactly what we are going to do for this task of our current mission. We will take the world map we used as a texture for our neon globe and show red dots on the map for each logfile entry.
The latitude is the coordinate that goes from the North Pole to the South Pole and ranges from -90
degrees to 90
degrees with 0
on the equator. The longitude runs around the globe and ranges from -180
degrees to 180
degrees. Longitude zero is on the so called "Prime Meridian", which runs through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London—I guess this answers the question of who invented this coordinate system.
When we think of a map, usually North and South America are on the left, Europe and Africa are in the middle, and Asia is on the right. On such a map, the origin of the geographic coordinate system we are using is at the center...