I'm pleased to report it was a good year for The Mail Archive. First, I spent the last three days making a beautiful poster illustrating the past 10 years of the service. It's designed like a tree stump, showing rings of growth. So far everyone who has seen it complains bitterly about it being incomprehensible, but hey, here it is anyway. Feel free to print out and stick on the wall next to that poster of the Human Genome.
http://www.mail-archive.com/images/poster.png What else? This year - barring any last minute catastrophe - we will have a measured uptime of 99.72%, which is pretty good. Not quite at the goal of 99.9%, but this is steady improvement from last year. Other accomplishments included the hardware update for our primary server "gen8" which is something of a monster. It currently has 32 gigabytes of RAM and we're toying with the idea of increasing that further in 2009. All for the sake of shaving off a few more milliseconds of serving latency. The service remains stable financially and we were able to increase the amount of donations, particularly during the third quarter. Other changes have been evolutionary, including a slight improvement in protection of email addresses from spam harvesters. We put a 2D barcode on the info pages in recognition that more and more people are getting fancy cell phones. Arabic and Vietnamese (finally!) have been added as localizations. I also made some software improvements to reduce archiving latency, which is now graphed in realtime on the FAQ. As usual, much of that improvement was eaten up due to increased traffic. In personal news, I finally made the big lifestyle change and purchased a road bicycle. Complete with those clip in pedals that make it easy to fall over at traffic lights. It only took about ten years, but I think this finally completes my metamorphosis into a Californian, Lycra shirt and all. Totally worth it, at least two miles per hour faster. I also celebrated my 35th birthday with a shockingly large number of candles on the cake. As always, a big thank you to everyone involved and happy new year. Jeff -- To unsubscribe, send mail to gossip-unsubscr...@jab.org.
