Arch Linux is my preferred Linux distribution. Not many of the VPS providers offer Arch Linux though. Here is my review of three options. It is worth mentioning that using Arch Linux for a critical server that needs to stay up is generally not recommended. Updates are frequent and they sometimes come with big changes. There are situations where the only way to fix something that breaks after an update is to read the news on the Arch Linux website. CentOS and Debian are good reliable choices.

This covers how to install and start using mod_wsgi with Apache on Arch Linux.

Lisp goes back to the 50s and was popular in the 80s. It is one of the oldest programming languages. According to Wikipedia, Fortran is the only high level programming language older than Lisp. There were many dialects back then, but Common Lisp is the dialect of our age. It has been called the programmable programming language. It has a very interesting history.

Here is a quick example of how to use Go's html/template package to loop through a slice of structs and print out the contents. Note that in the templates {{.}} prints all the template variables, and . refers to the data passed.

type Person struct {
  var Name string
  var Age int
}

Simple struct definition for our Person

Without proper care, developers can leave their CakePHP website open to cross-site scripting attacks. Controllers using scaffold functions do not take care to sanitize data, and leaves the website vulnerable. When using the bake tool in the console, it generates controllers as simple as the scaffold version. Some suggest storing the unsanitized data and escape the dangerous characters on output. In a perfect world I would agree with this approach, but it is easy to forget to sanitize output every time, or for an amateur developer to be ignorant of the dangers.

Arch Linux is known for being a lightweight do-it-yourself distribution. Unlike some other distributions like Ubuntu and Linux Mint that come with a preconfigured desktop and all the programs installed, Arch Linux let's you build things up from the ground up yourself. For the uninitiated this can be an intimidating task, but it's not that once you wrap your mind around it. I'm going to go over customizing a Gnome 3 desktop environment including icons, cursors, themes, wallpapers, etc.

Arch Linux is a great distro that boasts bleeding edge up-to-date rolling releases as well as a very light and efficient base install. There is no graphical install and it expects you to have some basic Linux chops already just to perform the installation. Beginners shouldn't be scared away though because Arch Linux has a great wiki and awesome documentation.

CakePHP comes with a core JsHelper that allows a developer to call PHP functions that will create the JavaScript using a number of libraries including jQuery and Prototype. Pagination in CakePHP is a very common task and it can be enhanced using AJAX. Fortunately the Pagination component/helper are built to handle the AJAX. You can set the pagination defaults in the controller with the code below. Alternatively you could set specific elements of the array inside an action with a call like $paginate['conditions'] = array();

There is a way to get your exchange mail and calendar in Thunderbird, however I'll be honest I still had issues with the calendar after doing all of this. The calendar would load once, but then not load again. I'm going to provide this for reference. Perhaps in the near future some bugs will be sorted out in these addons, and maybe someone will have a comment on the configuration. I have included specfic versions numbers. If you want GOOD Exchange 2010 support, I recommend using Evolution.