Dates

• Wednesday 21 September 2016 was the first day of spring in Australia.

• Tomorrow, Thursday 22 September 2016, will be the first day of autumn in France.

• And Saturday 24 September 2016 will be my 76th birthday... in both Australia and France, of course!

India buys French Rafale fighter planes

India has confirmed the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter planes, totally made-in-France by Dassault. Details of the deal have not been made public, but it's probably in the vicinity of 8 billion dollars.

Vatican's latest saint

Click the comic strip to enlarge

Nice tweet

I like this tweet from

@boldatheism

Morandini in police custody

The well-known 51-year-old journalist and TV producer Jean-Marc Morandini has been in police custody since 9 o’clock this morning, in the context of an inquiry into the corruption of youth.

Flash is about to disappear

Once upon a time, Flash was the coolest kid on the block. I worked hard to master it. Most of my old websites of which I'm most proud today were created in Flash. In my wildest dreams, I never imagined for an instant that all these websites would disappear in the near future, simply because no navigator was prepared to display them.

I've just heard that, soon, neither Safari, Chrome nor Firefox will be prepared to display Flash websites.

Theoretically, I might be able to retrieve images from my Flash websites, before they disappear forever, and then rebuild them in HTML 5. I plan to examine this idea, but I'm not sure that it's both easy and worthwhile. Here, for example, are several typical French/English websites that are due to disappear: Master Bruno.

A similar calamity occurred with the Apple Pages tool, which subsided into a brain-damaged state a few years ago, losing many of its major capacities, because its owner wanted to propose a common denominator of talents that could be demonstrated, not only on an iMac, but also on an iPad or iPhone. Personally, I find that goal ridiculous. It's akin to taking a schoolboy and an Olympic athlete, and asking them to be trained together to run the hundred metres in much the same time. One gets pepped up with pills; the other gets castrated.