A couple little bits of Technical news that caught my attention overnight.
Fairfax [1] have becoming a network peering partner of PIPE Networks [2].
For many people in Australia this will reduce the number of hops to Fairfax websites, making them much faster to load and interact with. Sites included in this are The Sydney Morning Herald [3], The Age [4], MyCareer.com.au [5] and many other Fairfax Digital [6] sites.
Interestingly MyTalk.com.au [7] which they inherited from Southern Cross Broadcasting is not a part of the peering agreement, probably due to it seemingly being hosted somewhere in Adelaide and therefore not being part of the New South Wales agreement.
In other (probably more interesting) news, MySQL AB has been purchased by Sun Microsystems [8] (even if the title of the article makes that less than clear). MySQL AB are the people responsible for the popular MySQL database, which is used as the backend for many a website including this one.
Sun Microsystems have a pretty good record of supporting open source software, and the people at MySQL AB seem pretty happy, so hopefully this will be a good thing.
Samuel