OK, so technically he didn’t ask me specifically. But I think it’s safe to say that there was an implicit “*Legion*! Yousosmart! Helpme!” at the front of it.

The answer is, yes @philcooper, Windows and the NTFS filesystem support symbolic links (or “junctions”, as they call them). However, Windows Explorer has no friggin clue how to create these by default. It is not enlightened like bash. Luckily, the Link Shell Extension exists to allow you to create these links from an Explorer context menu.

Basically, what you need to do is:
1. Install Link Shell Extension
2. Right-click on the source folder you want your link to point to, and select Pick Link Source
3. Right-click inside the folder where you want to create your new link, and select Drop As… Junction

Bam! You now have a symbolic link.

Why would you want to do this? Well, the reason I bothered to learn how is the same as @philcooper’s reasoning: to store savegames in Dropbox. Not every game supports savegame storage in Steam Cloud yet, so we must engineer our own solutions if we want to bounce from desktop to laptop (to laptop, to laptop…) and always have our savegames on hand. In fact, it was this post on the Runic Games forum explaining how to do this for Torchlight that got me started. (Ironically, I think Torchlight actually supports Steam Cloud now).

I have a Dropbox folder named Saved Games. When I first start a game and create my first save game, I cut-and-paste that entire savegames folder into Saved Games/gamename, then right-click on it, Pick Link Source, and drop a junction right where the savegame folder used to be.

I brought home a much-needed file cabinet:

Stacey got a chair for her classroom:

One applicant really took himself out of the running because of the lone picture of him on his home page (which served as his portfolio). The picture was of him at his computer, wearing something looking like a Mexican wrestling mask over his head, with sunglasses over the mask. It’s hard to do the picture justice in text.

EDIT: After going back and forth over it, I decided to post the picture, but only after copying it over to my blog instead of hotlinking directly to it (so as to not expose the poor guy’s homepage URL):

The photo really chased off my boss and the other designers. They’re very concerned about personalities of the “tech” people they bring in, as they had a very bad experience with the programmer they had before me (which is what led to there being an opening, and me stumbling into the job). We’re not a stuffy corporate environment; our office is decorated like a jungle, and I get to come into work every day wearing shorts and with my (well-behaved) dog, who spends the day curled up under the adjacent desk. So it’s a bad thing when the way you present yourself chases off this group of people.

OK, given that my last few blog posts include professed “love” (we’ll call it love) of the 17-year-old redheaded German curling girl, and a photo of the “sorry, no EBT” sign on the door of the nearby 7-11, I’m probably not speaking from high ground here. But think about what you put out there, especially when you’re applying for a job.

KDESVN? Nudism?

My SVN client usually just crashes.

EDIT: When I got home, I just had to double-check the site:

Hmm. I’m just not seeing it.

EDIT #2: Mystery solved. If we look at www.alwins-world.de, we find a photo gallery with:

PROTIP: While I’m all for photos of nude females, it might be wise to host your open source project on a different domain, for reasons exactly like this. Come on. A domain name is $10.

I saw one as I watched the German women’s curling team. Here’s to you, redhead:

(The young one in the front, not the kneeling banshee in mid-scream)

Her name is Stella Heiss. Actually, her last name is “Heiß”. I’ve always wanted a chick whose name requires Unicode. She’s also only 17, so she can spend a year in the minors before we call her up to the big leagues. Her dad is former German ice hockey national team goaltender Josef Heiß.

I’m not alone in liking Stella. Bleacher Report ranked her #7 on their list of Hotties of Olympic Curling. (Stella’s teammate, Melanie Robillard, ranked #1, and with good reason. But redheads hold the key to my heart.)

(Melanie and Stella)

Stella is most certainly welcome to bring Melanie along.

(Melanie and Stella bookend a group that drops off severely between the endpoints)

Is 7-11 really the place to be spending one’s EBT money?

Best of all, the sign originally just said EBT, without “(food stamps)” next to it. It was necessary to clarify.

Apparently the rest of the Internet likes Shirley Manson grabbing her chest as much as I do.

It was fun.

I was having an error with the Subclipse SVN plugin for Eclipse. Specifically, when I tried a merge operation, I got:

SVNClientException: org.tigris.subversion.javahl.ClientException: svn: Cannot create new file '/tmp/(blahblahblah)...'

The problem was that Subclipse only comes with the 32-bit version of JavaHL. I confirmed JavaHL was not present by going to Window -> Preferences and browsing to Team -> SVN. In the SVN Interface dropdown, it said “JavaHL(JNI) Not Available”.

If you’re on 64-bit Linux and using a 64-bit JVM, you need to provide JavaHL yourself. It can be installed by:

$ sudo aptitude install libsvn-java

… but you have to tell Eclipse to look at the location where the JNI will be installed (/usr/lib/jni). This can be done by editing eclipse.ini and adding the line “-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni” under “vmargs”.

So the eclipse.ini file would look something like this:

(... some junk ...)
-vmargs
-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni
(... possibly more junk ...)

Basically, you’re looking for the line “-vmargs” and inserting the “-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni” as a new line immediately underneath it. If you actually paste “some junk” into your eclipse.ini file, tell me about it and I will laugh at you.

Save and re-launch Eclipse, and you should see the JavaHL version in that SVN Interface dropdown box.

Reference: Subclipse wiki page.