Happy New Year. As The Mail Archive enters its 15th year of operation, let's take a quick look back. This year we had a record uptime percentage of 99.69%. That number jumps to 99.96% if you forgive the day we were deliberately dark in protest of the proposed SOPA law in the United States. There are two reasons for the improvement. First, switching all messages over to solid state storage mid-year really helped; the disk subsystem used to lockup every few months, and that has gone away entirely. Second, internally we paid a lot more attention to this topic. Which you can see from the heckling I took during an operating system upgrade last week. (Warning: strong language.) http://www.mail-archive.com/heckle.html
The message page redesign was also a lot of fun. We used the services of a professional designer, paying particular attention to recent web standards. The process even included a usability study under controlled conditions. Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback so far. Finally, as you may know, I grew up in Vermont, and was inspired by the business example set by Ben & Jerry's. While we didn't give away any free ice cream, we continued our charter of donating a portion of revenue to good causes. Aside from computer-ish stuff, this year included welfare of animals, a forestry organization, and a sustainable energy initiative. Less well known is our goal of having fun. 100% of The Mail Archive staff is now trained in TIG Welding (just in case). We also got to experience flying in a zeppelin over the San Francisco Bay, which was pretty amazing. That's possibly a little more fun than our financials would really encourage, but fortunately things continue to be sustainable and healthy. I wish a happy and healthy new year to everyone, and to every byte of data. Cheers, Jeff -- To unsubscribe, send mail to gossip-unsubscr...@jab.org.
