Title: Editorial

Around the start of the year, James asked if anyone fancied taking over the helm of the good ship C Vu as both his work and personal life had changed somewhat and it was becoming harder and harder to do the job as well as he had been doing it. A tough act to follow if ever there was one. In a moment of insanity, I stepped forward (or was that everyone else jumped back!) and that was that.

The last edition really marked the start of my stint at the helm and with the backup of everyone involved, we managed to get the issue out. Okay, it wasn't there in time for the conference, but that did mean that delegates would have a happy surprise for when they arrived home and everyone else could have a good read.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank James on behalf of everyone for his hard work on C Vu and wish him all the best for his future endeavours. I'm sure he won't be too far away.

There has been some talk over the future of the two magazines (mainly at about 1am at the Conference, shortly before a fire alarm sounded! You'd be surprised at how many things get discussed in such a way). I'm happy to say that for the time being Overload and C Vu will be apart. While there are good reasons behind merging the two with a joint editorial team, it is felt that for now there is enough distinction between the two to merit keeping them as discrete entities.

As with the famous BBC TV show Dr Who, a new editor brings in quite a few changes.

Pete Goodliffe has been asking for quite a few editions now for new writers to come forth and see their work in lights. His call has been answered. Not only do we have a new series on using Qt, but in the coming editions there will be tutorials on using C# and wxWidgets. The only GUI library we're now short of is GTK. Any volunteers?

There are also plans afoot to revise the reviewing system to enable us to have a more comprehensive (and consistent!) method of reviewing books. It will also mean a greater range of ratings instead of the normal four. More of that soon.

There are many "views from the conference" in this edition. It certainly was a busy conference and in a number of ways, an eye opener for someone who is not based in a programming environment and for whom it was the first conference ever attended.

If I exclude the nightmare journey down (the M6 had been closed most of the day so instead of a nice easy 3 hour journey, it meant diverting from Merseyside to Leeds and then down the M1, cut across country to the M40 and onto Oxford - a not so nice 5 hour journey!), the aspect which has stuck with me has been the friendliness of everyone. It was so refreshing that those involved with the open source movement were happy to talk to the chap from Microsoft without the usual baiting which has been seen from time to time. The sheer professionalism of the whole set up was breathtaking.

As I've said, this was my first conference and I was also one of the first speakers (10 am session on the Wednesday). Given that I only had about 60% of my voice back (I had gone down with a rather grotty cold on the Sunday before the conference), the talk went well and to me raised something very interesting; how little industry knows about how education works and what was involved in teaching. It was a pity that the last edition of C Vu missed the conference as my editorial formed the basis of my talk. Oh well, not much can be done about that.

The venue was very good but it did have one drawback - the temperature. Being an old Victorian building, the bricks kept the heat in and so things became warm quickly. It was not helped by the lack of air conditioning. Temperatures in the keynote sessions could become unbearable. By the end of the week, I was taking in a bottle of water per half length session. If that one problem is addressed, then I'm sure that the conference next year will be an even bigger success. My other problem was the laptop didn't have a PCMCIA socket, so I couldn't make use of the wireless LAN connection provided by the hotel and there was no chance of me forking out the £70+ to PC World for a USB wireless modem. Pity, but there you go.

That may not sound very much, but in the world we live in, not having internet access for even something as simple as email when you're used to it really is something. Okay, I wasn't going cold turkey or anything as drastic as that, but not having access to the world outside (other than the very pedestrian news programmes on TV - gah! that's 5 hours old - I want my news NOW!!!!) was a pain, especially as it was so near. I think the worst part of not having email access was getting home to 1000+ emails. Not bad for 5 days (or so) of not being around. Oddly, there was also very little spam - it looks like SpamAssassin had done its job.

It was also good to finally put names to faces. Despite having been on the committee for the past year, there were so many names I knew but who I had never met. Francis Glassborow, Allan Kelly and John Merrells being just three of them. Happily, I now do know them from Adam now. Other than Francis, people were roughly what I imagined they would look like...

If you've not been to the ACCU conference before, I heartily recommend it to you for next year. It certainly will be remembered by myself for a good few years to come!

I would like to thank Paul Grenyer for his able assistance on this issue's editorial checking. Much appreciated.