Neil McAllister raises questions regarding Web development skills in an era of constant innovation. Sure, low barriers to entry give underdog technologies ample opportunity to thrive without the backing of name-brand vendors. But doesn't this fragmentation of the Web development market put undue pressure on developers to specialize? The result is a crisis, McAllister concludes, one in which maintaining a marketable skill set and hiring for a particular Web project gets more difficult as the state of the art changes on an almost daily basis.

Computerworld interviews Stephen C. Johnson, the brains behind YACC Yet Another Compiler Compiler: The compiler was developed some 35 years ago and is still going strong today through various incarnations. Asked what he is proudest of in terms of YACC's development and use, Johnson said: "I think computing is a service profession. I am happiest when the programs that I have written (YACC, Lint, the Portable C Compiler) are useful to others. In this regard, the contribution YACC made to the spread of Unix and C is what I'm proudest of." And would he do anything differently? "I'd try harder to find a notation other than $1, $2, $$, etc. While simple and intuitive, the notation is a source of errors as grammars evolve."

The Linux desktop has come a long, long way, but there are still times when I have to use the command line. (I am a hardcore user, after all.) But even though I'm used to typing, spending hours upon hours with my fingers at the keyboard, I still grow tired of typing the same commands over and over. To reduce that tedium, I always add aliases to my .bashrc file.

Do you want to build your Web sites faster and cheaper, but still leverage industrial-strength technology? You can do just that using Grails and Apache Geronimo. In this article, you will see how easy Grails can make Web development and how easy Geronimo can make Grails deployment. Also see how a Grails application can leverage the resources and services provided by Geronimo.

360Desktop is a software that extends the Windows desktop into a panaromic desktop, with unlimited space. In addition, "it allows users to easily grab their favorite web content from across the web, and put it right on their expanded desktop". Demo of 360Desktop in action.

Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group recently hosted its first Kernel Walkthrough given by Bart Trojanowski. Bart starts with a one-hour presentation introducing some Linux development background, file layout and data types. The code walkthrough following the presentation covers some important files and Linux list and bit modification APIs.A Google Video version (presentation only) is also available.