There's an orthographic projection of Earth at https://simply.earth that tries to handle distortions in a different way -- by allowing the user to change the viewing angle using the mouse.

Orthographic projects have the property that the area of least distortion is always at the very center of the map. By exploring the Earth this way we can more readily determine the relative size of things.

Great article, thanks for sharing those gorgeous historical maps. I love them.

Programmer Productivity

The World Wide Web’s hypertext markup language (HTML) has an inherent beauty all its own:

• Both the author’s words and the typographer’s instructions are contained in a single plain text file.
• Instructions are encoded using short, easily remembered mnemonics.
• Mnemonics are wrapped into pairs of less-than/greater-than tags which are easily parsed by software.
• Tagged words are nested inside tagged paragraphs.
• Paragraphs are assembled into sections, and sections into the whole.
• The whole document is structured in a hierarchical way that just makes sense.

It’s easy to get started with HTML. There’s a handful of tags, with single-letter mnemonics, used to…

Every once in a while we come across a truly delightful piece of software: one that lets us accomplish something significant, that’s intuitively clear to operate, that safely and privately handles our needs, and that complies with industry standards and legal requirements.

We can easily recognize the excellent quality of such software. Every aspect of its inner working is intentionally created to meet specific goals; every feature serves a purpose and works correctly; nothing distracts from the task at hand. In short, software of this type just works.

There was a time when the phrase “easy to use” was a…

Algorithms

W. Randolph Franklin’s “point inclusion in polygon” algorithm weighs in at just seven lines of C code. It’s intuitively easy to understand, yet fast enough to work with sophisticated GIS datasets. It’s one of those gems that every advanced programmer should know.

This article demonstrates how to use Franklin’s PNPOLY with client-facing JavaScript to detect when the user's mouse is hovering over a non-rectangular polygon.

PNPOLY algorithm

The concept behind the algorithm is simple enough: extend an imaginary, semi-infinite ray from the position of the mouse towards the right, counting how many times the line crosses an edge of the polygon.

Op-Ed Column

This world is being assembled, in bits and pieces, from our interactions with technology: the tracking and surveillance of our movements; the communications and transactions of our commerce; the words and pictures of our inner circle; the desires and fears of our search for knowledge; and even the patterns and habits of our free time.

This is a dark thought, perhaps one that we’d rather not contemplate. …

Web Development

The use of dynamic requests to backend servers is prevalent in modern web applications. Despite its commonplace nature, there are some gotchas that trip up even experienced developers.

TL;DR

In order to successfully preflight a JSON-encoded request to a different domain, the browser’s fetch request must include the HTTP header access-control-request-headers: content-type.

In order to signal that a JSON-encoded request from a different domain is permitted, the remote server must be correctly configured to respond with the HTTP header access-control-allow-headers: content-type.

Basic CORS rules

Before getting started, let’s review when Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is required.

• CORS is only used when a web…

DOM Components

At some point in our lives, most of us have whiled away the time reading one thing after another on the internet, as our fancy dictates. Lazy surfing the web is a pleasure all unto itself. No one knows what rabbit hole we may go down, or what pearls may be discovered through serendipity.

At one time it was considered a good practice in web design to provide an over-abundance of hyperlinks, to help readers navigate a website from page to page. This strategy was employed to guide readers toward related information, news or articles.

More recently though, that thinking…

Web Development

Software developers work with dates and times on a regular basis. We understand the rules for determining leap years, the methods for calculating time spans, and the proper use of time offsets from Coordinated Universal Time.

Unfortunately, when it comes to summer-time versus winter-time there’s a big gap in our understanding. Relying on the time broadcast from the nearest cell-phone tower may be good enough for lay people, but programmers need to know a lot more.

TL;DR — Download daylight saving time data files for 2021, in JSON format, from the daylight-saving-time-2021 GitHub repo.

Standard time zones

We know that standard time is…