Symbolic links can be very useful, but if you are a Windows user, you’ve had to use junction points because there hasn’t been native support for symbolic links until recently.

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 now support symbolic links mklink command. See Junfeng Zhang’s write up on the mklink command.

For those using Windows 2000 or XP, you’ll still need to use junction points to achieve a similar effect. Microsoft has a KB article on creating junction points, but there are some drawbacks to manually trying to manually manage junction points.

Fortunately, there are tools available that ease the pain of using junction points and prevent you from having to know all of the command line options. One such tool is NTFS Link, which provides shell integration for junction points. You can simply right-click in a folder and select New > NTFS Junction Point. Then select the target folder to link to and a “new” folder, named “Link to target folder” will be created in the directory you are in.

So, if you are a Windows user, you now have a couple of different options for creating and using symbolic links!

The VMWare Player does not include an option to clear the list of “Recent Virtual Machines” (why not?!?!). Since the list of virtual machines that I had opened was growing quite long, I set out to find a way to clear it myself.

After searching in a few places (Windows XP), I came across the file that holds this information. It’s called preferences.ini and is located in:
[drive]:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Application Data\VMWare

UPDATE: In Windows Vista, the file is located in:
[drive]:\Users\[user]\AppData\Roaming\VMWare

At the bottom of the file, you should see entries like (where X is a sequential number):

pref.mruVMX.filename = "..."
pref.mruVMX.displayname = "..."

Just delete/reorder the entries as desired, save, then start VMWare Player to see the changes. VMWare Player will need to be closed before you make the changes, or they will not be saved.

Even with the volume turned off, if your PC has a system speaker, it can still emit a loud system beep. I was running some MySQL statements from the command line and every time there was an error…BEEP.

To fix this, I could simply run the MySQL commands with the -b, –no-beep option, which turns off the beep on errors.

But, I’m lazy and don’t want to type -b every time I run a MySQL command. Plus, there are other instances where the system beep can be triggered, and I just don’t want to hear it! So, I used this solution…and it didn’t require a reboot!

In summary:
1. Right-click on My Computer
2. On the Hardware tab, click on [Device Manager]
3. On the “View” menu, select “Show hidden devices”
4. Under “Non-Plug and Play Drivers”, right-click “Beep”
5. Click “Disable”
6. Answer [Yes] when asked if you really want to disable it
7. Answer [No] when asked if you want to reboot
8. Right-click “Beep” again.
9. Click “Properties”
10. On the “Driver” tab, set the Startup type to Disabled
11. Click [Stop]
12. Click [OK]
13. Answer [No] when asked if you want to reboot

I stumbled upon a PHP framework called Kohana, which is based on CodeIgniter. I’ve used CI a bit in the past and thought I’d give Kohana a whirl. I downloaded the latest code and tried to run it on a Windows XP machine.

Well, when I brought up the site, I got an error:

Fatal error: Unable to locate the requested file, log.php in <system_path>/system/core/Kohana.php on line 408

After a lot of digging, I found that there was a glob() call that was not behaving correctly. I narrowed it down to what I believe to be a bug in PHP with the glob() function, using the GLOB_BRACE flag, and using a pattern that includes a colon (as in {c:/firstFolderToCheck,c:/secondFolderToCheck}).

Assuming it turns out to be valid, I’m surprised that it hasn’t been found/reported before…