So it’s the end of the year, and it’s been quite a busy one, so I decided to write down my personal top few highlights.

Fraser on the day he was born

• Our first baby boy, Fraser, was born. He’s very cute 🙂

• It’s the end of the first full year for my company Nutmeg Data
  
  
  , and I don’t see myself going back to full time employment. It’s been great fun, and I’ve learnt an awful lot as I’ve gone on. The biggest thing I might of learnt is that having asupportive wife is very nice, especially when they sort through the paperwork for you.

• We submitted a request for planning permission to extend our house, this is a big deal!

I’m sure there’s lots more, and there’s probably another blog post around the technology events of the year, and what’s been the biggest issues for me, but maybe that’s for the new year.

I hope everyone out there has a few highlights of their own to look back on, and here’s to 2012!

Buying a domain can cost you anywhere from $1 to $1 million, but no matter what you spend, it’ll probably be the cheapest part of your online presence.

So when I see people who definitely know better about GoDaddy and bulk domain registrars in general use the excuse that they had a $1 sale on, or whatever other reason, I can only think “A domain can be cheap but your reputation is priceless, so start using your head not your discount vouchers”.

If you are picking your domain registrar, the people who control your most important asset, on the basis of price alone, frankly you’ve got nobody else to blame when things go wrong.

Full disclosure, my company Nutmeg Data is a UK domain registrar but we don’t deal with the general public and I would recommend Domain Monster or Gandi if someone asked me.

Are Google already prepared for the next generation of low powered servers with ARM processors?

Specifically the targeting of the Javascript v8 engine and the Go system programming language at ARM suggest that Google have planned for a future with ARM based servers, as neither is particularly useful for Android. Their work on bringing high performance code to the ARM architecture suggests that they are already thinking about it, if not already using them in production.

So what would a Google ARM server look like? With fully-built ARM servers fitting into a credit card sized space, perhaps we’re looking at a bare motherboard supplying power and connectivity, with fully functioning ARM servers sat in slots like memory chips in an x86 motherboard? And for storage, perhaps each one has a single consumer specification SSD, or will Google move away from local storage in the future?

Unfortunately there’s no way to be sure for now, perhaps Google have only done some basic trials on ARM and decided it’s too early, but I’m sure that in 2012 we’ll hear rumours of Google deploying low cost ARM servers in significant numbers.

Update: As Justin Cormack correctly points out, Android 2.2 and up uses v8 for it’s browser (which isn’t Chrome)

Photo by 37 Prime on Flickr, Creative Commons ShareAlike