The CSIRO in Australia have an SVG Toolkit for PocketPC. Yahoo have a Group for SVG Developers, but so far I have failed to register with Yahoo (their clever on-line forms fail on Opera/Linux 5). This leaves me forced to subscribe to the mailing list, which (given I hardly ever find time to read may email at home) is likely to flood my inbox to little effect. Oh, well. There is also the SVG Wiki, where the distilled wisdom of the mailing list is already emerging.
As we come up to the Jubilee weekend, I have dug out my little Australian flag in case any flag-waving is required. Typing Australian Flag in to Google finds Ausflag, a campaign for a new Australian flag (I quite like this one), and The Australian National Flag Association, dedicated to celebrating Flag Day (the anniversary of the first hoisting of the Australian flag on 3 September 1901). I had a look and found a cool new New Zealand flag as well.
Today is the 200th anniversary of Wordsworth’s ode to London (luckily he could not afford to ride inside the coach, so got a view worth writing about...).
It is also the 101st anniversary of the raising of the flag of the then shiny-new Australian commonwealth (3 September 1901). As it happens, when it came to making up quizzes for some testing software at work, I whimsically chose the Australian flag as a topic, which meant I ended up drawing my own. The one up at the top right there is the 1901 edition; it is largely similar to the current National flag—can you spot the differences? (See also my entry for 31 May.)
Australia is adjusting its immigration requirements in response to changes in population. The BBC has to report this by (a) claiming Australia is harder to get in to than Wimbleton Centre Court, which I doubt, and (b) running some crap comedian who proceded to air every bewhiskered stereotype about Australians the British have devised, and in the most offensive terms possible. Fuck off, says I. If you want to have a humour piece about Australian immigration politics, at least hire an Australian comedian. They're good at it. Read more
I already mentioned Ausflag and their mission to persuade the powers that be that retaining the British Union flag in the Australian flag is a little out of date given that Australia has been an independent nation since 1986. They ran a competition for a replacement flag with results announced in 2000. I have added my version of Franck Gentil's competition winner to my SVG-based flag collection. This is it in PNG format: Read more