So time actually flies and it is already the final year of my in NUS. After overloading some semesters in previous 3 years I am finally able to take a relatively less busy semester. So this semester I am only taking 4 modules including FYP(CG4001): CS2104, CS4224, EG2401 and of course CG4001. And since I have more free time, I was also the teaching assistant of 3 modules(CS2103, CG3002, CG3207) and taking some other part-time work. So in the end I am not any less busy than before but filling with stuff to do is a good feeling indeed.

Vagrant is a great tool for development environment isolation(well, a more light-weighted and more popular one is Docker nowdays). But recently when I install Vagrant on Windows, I encounter an error saying “rsync not found on your path”.

Since CentOS 7, MySQL has been replaced with MariaDB as the default “official” database management software. A quick search on Google yeilded a few posts and all of them are about MariaDB. Well, I cannot blame those authors anyway since if you did not install MySQL rpm and you try typing “yum install mysql-server” on CentOS 7, you do not see any error report of “package not found” but instead yum will return MariaDB as the result. Since MySQL was purchased by Orable, there is an increasing trend for developers to switch to PostgreSQL and MariaDB but still there are many users sticking to MySQL now. So let’s see how to install a real MySQL on CentOS 7.

What is CppCMS? CppCMS is a Free High Performance Web Development Framework (not a CMS) aimed at Rapid Web Application Development. It differs from most other web development frameworks like: Python Django, Java Servlets in the following ways:

MySQL(other database management systems as well) have connectors in different languages(such as C++, Python, Ruby, Java and so on) already and we do not have many opportunities working with MySQL C APIs nowadays. However, C API is still the most native APIs in MySQL and in this post I will guide you through the process of connecting to MySQL via C API.

Web programming essentially is about text processing–at least it was mainly about getting requests in the form of text and then response with text/html as well. Of course later some more file formats are supported and currently we even have just JSON based reponses–the main stream(like JSON, html, JavaScript and CSS) is still text based. For processing text, scripting languages like Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby are great and therefore we see popular web development technologies are mostly based on these languages(Now we have Java, Scala, Go, Erlang and many more choices as well though). So spending time figuring out how C++ is going to do this job just does not seem to be right.

In 2015, I am becoming a fourth-year student in National University of Singapore. Along with graduation comes near the job hunting, during which I have learned some valuable lessons in stepping into the society(走向社会 as in Chinese, which basically means that after 16 years of simple school life, one finally gets the opportunity to meet more kinds of people and experience all sorts of complexities emotionally and intellectually). Throughout the year, I have been trying to read more books to enrich my knowledge and understanding. Besides books, I also want to talk about movies as I have watched some good or just-so-so movies as entertainment.