Martin Howse specifies a totally pluggable environment for advanced audio and textual experimentation

Why should free software be chained to keyboard, mouse and screen? Martin Howse examines open tools which allow for embedding computation deep within the environment.

"Security is a sickness rather than a cure" - The anti-viral industries are engaged in a battle against the natural. Self reproduction is embedded deep within the technology of computation and by default its history and culture. Martin Howse sieves out the viral seed under both the open and the closed models of coding.

With its feet firmly rooted in open standards and interoperability, the Semantic Web seeks to build a meaningful and heavily decentralised net which favours language and understanding over the bland concerns of control. Martin Howse investigates technologies which could radically rewrite the Web in truly emergent fashion

Presenting the very antithesis of functional computing, the crash is an area ripe for exploration, exposing as it does the rich seam between writable and runnable, and offering radical insights into the contemporary interface between man and machine. Martin Howse dons a hard hat to mine deep into this rich geology

Designing, building and finally running with a custom-crafted, free and open processor is a hacker's dream which dates well back to the early days of homebrewing. Martin Howse examines how soft hardware in the form of FPGAs goes some of the distance towards realising this promise.

Developing Lisp code on a free software platform is no mean feat, and documentation, though available, is dispersed and often too concise for users new to Lisp. In an accessible guide to this flexible language, self-confessed Lisp newbie Martin Howse assesses practical issues and implementations under GNU/Linux

Under a proprietary model, the executable is all, bypassing all that is cultural or textual, and ignorant of any code above buried instruction sets. With a transparency plagued only by always impending crash and implied viral burn, the icon is the action; a conditioned reflex with GUI designers very much as Pavlov's eager pupils. It's all a game of click and run, or, with the cynical humour of small-time peripheral pedlar's, plug and pray. Just remember to keep your data safe as the creaking ship of an insecure OS tosses and heaves on an ever angry networked ocean.

With a foreword from Dennis Ritchie, co-creator of Unix and sole inventor of the C programming language, which stresses both standards and quality literature with regard to the longevity of such an aging operating system, this updated and totally classic title is well assured of its pedigree. The original work, penned by Stevens and published way back in 1992 has long been considered one of the great works within the canon of computing literature.

Genera. Home of the brave coder but very much not located anywhere near the land of the free; Genera, the legendary OS and fully featured development environment running on the historic Symbolics Lisp machines, and later, in the guise of Open Genera, on Alpha hardware.