Project Sextant
What it is, what it
does, what it means.
Follow our progress
from a safe distance.
How our stuff works,
source code.
The Civilution weblog!
Learn something,
catch the fever.
Addresses, phone
numbers, maps, etc.
Civilution LLC
Tools for evolving civilizations
The first 90 percent of situational awareness is just knowing what the hell's going on.
-Col. Robert Pike, USAF
March 30 02000
Business closed today on account of first sun in months.
March 29 02000
Carl gets a hot lead on the fault-tolerant clickthrough tracker: a bit of Javascript wizardry that sends the clickthrough-tally signal via an image-load request. More details later. (Your comments on this problem are of course welcome.)
March 28 02000
The development environment is finally set up so we commence work, first concentrating on the "transparent" clickthrough-tracking service. We recognize our biggest problem/challenge is to figure out how to let the clickthrough work even if the clickthrough server is down. That is, how to make it so the reader gets through to his linked-to article, even if our server that logs the clickthrough is down for some reason.
March 25 02000
We all return from our various vacations. Deane happily announces that we are now a 100% legal company, with a business license and everything.
March 17 02000
Carl returns from the SXSW ("South by southwest") conference and gives the rundown. Most importantly, we learn about Blogger, a company setting up a free system that helps people set up weblogs of their own. Maybe we can impress them enough to partner with us.
(What's pretty funny is that they, and the other weblogging-related outfits, all had the same white/orange/blue color scheme as we do. So we'll all be dated together, a web company genre.)
Other than that, the basic good news is that there are more of these webloggers out there than we thought, and that many are interested in connecting their readers in discussion forums--just what we're interested in doing. They have some concerns, though, about making sure their weblogs are accessible even if our comment engine breaks down, which is perfectly reasonable.
March 13 02000
Carl takes off for the Bruce Stirlin Viridian party and south-by-southwest (SXSW) convention in Austin, Texas.
March 9 02000
We have our first meeting to discuss the specific form and functions of Sextant. Carl focuses on how webloggers will interface to it. Craig focuses on the screen layout and interface. Deane and Erik compile an exhaustive list of potential features and functions. This was good because we all had different ideas of what aspects were most important. We begin compiling our favorite ideas from each into paper and html prototypes.
March 6 02000
After further pondering our goals and necessary timeline, Carl makes his presentation for Sextant, a simpler, scaled down and much more immediately-useful subset/derivative of the much grander and complex document criticism and public opinion compiling concept "Lexington." He is warmly received. Project Sextant is born.
This page [mostly] maintained by Deane R. Mathewson
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