I guess many of you will have been on holiday in August and judging by a lack of blog posts here may have assumed that I was away too.

However, aside from a few days off at the start of the month learning to sail, the lack of blog postings has largely been caused by a very busy month.

The main focus this past month has been further work on next year’s Code Generation 2008 event. We’ve now finalised the budget for this event and this has enabled us work on the sponsorship prospectus. I’ve also been working with the Program Committee to draft up a Call for Speakers with a view to launching this in October. Finally, we’ve started the work of recruiting Supporting Partners for the event. These are essential to help promote the event and to give it more credibility with sponsors and participants.

Our other focus has been further work towards October’s Embedded Systems Show. Unless you’ve exhibited at this event or something similar in scale you perhaps don’t realise how much work has to be done to make the event a success. There’s a lot of paperwork to be done as well as designing the stand, ordering stuff and a hundred other things in addition to publicising the event to our contacts and to the wider community.

All of this is of course in addition to the normal activities of delivering consultancy and training, supporting those customers who haven’t gone on holiday,  keeping the business running smoothly and on-going business development . It’s no wonder I feel like another holiday already

ACCU Cambridge’s next talk will be given by Peter Smith of ARM.

“The linker is a vital part of most software development tool chains, yet it remains largely hidden and anonymous popping up only to deliver cryptic messages like “undefined symbol error”. Taken from a perspective of the linker as the centre of the software development universe, the talk examines the flexible more abstract components that are used as inputs to the linker. What the linker has to do to produce the less flexible but easier to process components that are loaded and executed by the operating system. It concludes with a look at the history of linking and how its complexity has ebbed and flowed with the introduction of new hardware and new programming languages. This includes a gaze into the future to look at where linkers are heading.”

The meeting takes place at DisplayLink (no pun intended) in Cambridge from 19:00. See the ACCU Cambridge page for more information and to pre-register.