InBerkeley

I don’t usually blog about the development work that I do, but today something notable happened that’s worth making an exception for.

Mid-day I checked my email and a message was waiting from Matt Mullenweg, the founder and chief guy at Automattic, the company that makes Wordpress, software that powers millions of blogs, including InBerkeley.

His team had been working with a format and protocol that I had designed many years ago as part of RSS 0.92 and RSS 2.0 called rssCloud. A few weeks ago at a lunch in San Francisco, he told me that they planned to ship it around this time. His message today said they were ready to go.

So Lance installed the new rssCloud plug-in here on InBerkeley, probably the first site outside of Matt’s company to do so. I tested it from the server in the media room in my North Berkeley house. We found a few problems and debugged them and got his software working with my software, the new River2 aggregator. They were ready to announce it.

A few minutes ago Lance installed the revised software here, and now with this post I’m going to find out if it works. If it does, my server will find out about this new post within seconds of its posting here. Wish us luck!

Sure enough! It worked. Happy.

It was so fast that it was there before I could refresh the page. This is the benchmark for “realtime web” performance.

Where does this lead? Well, the plan is to have a loosely coupled 140-character message network. In other words, a communication system, like Twitter, but without a company at the center of it. Kind of like the Internet itself.

You should be able to use any software to communicate with any other software, choice everywhere. So you could just as easily use wordpress.com, or as we do at InBerkeley, a hosted server, or in my case an old Mac laptop in my Berkeley den. It all should work seamlessly as one distributed network, and that’s just what happened today.

Today this vision took a huge step forward. Exciting stuff!!

PS: We’re having an rssCloud meetup on Wednesday night at UC-Berkeley.

General

If you’re in Berkeley and concerned that global warming will cause sea levels to rise, you may want to be sure you’re east of San Pablo Ave. Even if sea level rises 14 meters you’ll stay dry according this interactive flood map, which shows how familiar land contours will change as the oceans rise.

Other parts of the Bay Area don’t fare so well. According to the map, even a 1 meter rise will inundate SFO, Foster City and other parts of San Mateo and Santa Clara County shoreline.

Environment, General, Green, Issues

TechCrunch blog compares how the map products of the three major search engines are dealing with the closure of the Bay Bridge:

The short answer – Google wins. Yahoo a close second, and Microsoft Bing fails in this particular test.

Read the details at TechCrunch.

Transportation

AC Transit is proposing some dramatic changes to bus service in Berkeley and other parts of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. In many cases, frequencies are being reduced from every 30 minutes to every 40 or even 60 minutes, while several other lines, such as the 67 from downtown Berkeley to Tilden Park, may be eliminated altogether, with coverage shifted to the 65 line.

These proposed changes are due to a $57 million gap in AC Transit’s budget.  Before these changes are implemented, AC Transit has scheduled a series of community workshops this month where they will explain these changes and where citizens can voice their opinions, and has also set up several options for commenting on these proposed changes.

Government, Transportation