The Limbo Files

In 1985, when all the world was young and dot-matrix printers stalked the primeval swamps of computing, David Langford won his Hugo Award and began a long-running column for 8000 Plus magazine (later PCW Plus). This notoriously became the page readers turned to first. The magazine was devoted to the Amstrad PCW, a bestselling home computer that pioneered affordable word processing in Britain. Langford's popular column used this official subject as a launch pad for witty coverage of life, the universe and everything. Freelancing writing and how to survive it; science fiction (especially that); secrets of editors, manuscripts, indexes, submission letters and padding; serious and spoof advice columns; parodies of Adventure games, legal proceedings, noir fiction and more; causes, scams and literary horror stories; timeless satire on shabby practice in the computer industry; awful "Thog's Masterclass" lines from SF . . . Langford shows all the wit and skill that brought him 28 Hugo Awards.

One Friday evening Daniel de Luc, an elusive crime writer with a deep love of poetry, disappears from a Camps Bay apartment while cooking pasta. His wife Paola, desperately worried after days of hearing nothing, is contacted by an eccentric stranger who claims to have known her missing husband under a different name and warns her not to look for him. Paola soon learns that her husband was involved in the shadowy world of the international sex industry, where well-heeled women pay men to become the anonymous fathers of their children. As her neat, controlled existence is turned inside out, Paola struggles to keep a level head and find her own humanity while trying to outwit her enemies and stay alive. The result is a fast-paced thriller that shifts between Cape Town and Paris, blending realism with the fantastic and pitting love against the attraction of sexual adventure.

The first complete developer's guide to this exciting new breakthrough technology. The Inferno operating system is ideal for building interactive applications for set-top boxes, PDAs, palm-tops, and other networked devices that have limited computing resources, but need to handle multimedia such as streaming audio and video. This book provides a comprehensive guide to this technology. * Written by the host of the Inferno/Limbo FAQ *This is the first complete developer's guide to building Inferno applications with Limbo *Each chapter lists common programming pitfalls to avoid *Each chapter also features an in-depth analysis of a complete sample application that uses the particular concepts covered in it

Available together for the very first time, these are the first three crime novels in the inimitable Bob Skinner series by Quintin Jardine. Skinner's Rules As head of Edinburgh's CID, Detective Chief Superintendent Bob Skinner has seen it all... but even he is shocked by the savagely mutilated corpse discovered in a dark alleyway. Further random killings in the city suggest a vicious serial killer is on the rampage. But when the first victim's fiancee is also murdered, Skinner realises that someone is in deadly earnest... Skinner's Festival An explosion rocks Princes Street in the midst of the Edinburgh Festival. Responsibility is claimed by a group supposedly demanding political separation from Britain, but as atrocities escalate Skinner realises this is no gang of fanatics, but a highly professional team. And he is forced to assemble a crack task force, carry the ball when the government fumbles on the air, and wrestle with the beast within, who emerges with periodic ferocity to foil a clever, greedy scheme involving the crown jewels and Skinner's own daughter. Skinner's Trail First the joyous birth of Skinner's son... Then the grim reality of murder in one of Edinburgh's prosperous suburbs. As the murder investigation continues without result, it seems the killer was particularly cunning in covering his tracks - leaving no clues or leads to pursue. But then another seemingly minor crime takes Assistant Chief Constable Bob Skinner in a new direction, along a tortuous and bloody trail.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, FASE 2005, held in Edinburgh, UK in April 2005 as part of ETAPS. The 25 revised full papers presented together with an invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 105 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Web services, graph grammars and graph transformations, components, product lines, theory, code understanding and validation, UML, and automatic proofs and provers.