Find messages in skypes new database format

The db changed from that custom format similar to Kazaa to sqlite3, so to find stuff you now just write sql (sqlite3 flavour is a bit weird though). See this example and use .help, if you are stuck.

select author, body_xml from messages where strftime('%Y-%m-%d', timestamp, 'unixepoch') == '2013-01-18' and author == 'user';

xelatex, polyglossia - french and verbatim

An interesting problem with the combination of circumstances in the title has cropped up today. A minimal sample like this exhibits the problem:

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setdefaultlanguage{french}
\begin{document}
\verb|00:11:43:D4:86:A0|
\end{document}

 This code produces:

 whereas it correctly should look like this:

A bug about this has been reported, for now work around it with:
\newenvironment{\mverbatim}{\makeatletter \nofrench@punctuation\begin{verbatim}\makeatother}{\end{verbatim}\makeatletter\french@punctuation\makeatother}
The \verb is a little trickier, i'll think about that for a while. It probably boils down to copying the def from latex.ltx and adding an aftergroup or similar.
For now
\makeatletter\nofrench@punctuation
\verb|00:11:43:D4:86:A0|
\french@punctuation\makeatother
does the trick.

Widebar too wide

The following post shows a rather complicated solution to the problem of widebar being a little ugly that has naged for a while. Link

Always on Top

Always on Top was always something i missed under windows. There are a couple of dedicated tools for this, some of which sport a weird interface. Turns out you can get the same result with autohotkey (beginning to love this tool, even though the configuration is a little clumsy).
Anyway the snippet to make it work with ctrl-alt-t is
^!t::
WinGet, currentWindow, ID, A
WinSet, AlwaysOnTop, Toggle, ahk_id %currentWindow%

En-/Disabling the Windows+L-Locking shortcut

Upon pressing Windows + L Windows will lock your session. I for one am trained to switch terminal emulator tabs with that key combination and am greatly hindered by this.
So i created
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\DisableLockWorkstation
as a DWord (i had to create the System key as well) and set it to 1 for Disabling (0 would be for Enabling it again). Works instantly.

Changing the Windows keyboard layout *permanently*

I involuntarily spend a lot of time in windows at the moment and one of the things that drives me nuts, is the inability to use different keyboard layouts permanently, globally without uninstalling the alternatives. Having to change it for every window, and redoing it after closing one just doesn't cut it. So i now use autohotkey  as an xmodmap and xbindkeys replacement and combine it with kbswitch. In order to get us altgr-intl (the parts that interest me) and make capslock another escape i switch the language to english and use the following autohotkey script:
CapsLock::Escape
>!y::SendInput ü
>!p::SendInput ö
>!q::SendInput ä
>!s::SendInput ß
+>!y::SendInput Ü
+>!p::SendInput Ö
+>!q::SendInput Ä
This appears to satisify my most basic needs for now. Now if there was something that would make this insanity of a vfs less messy i'd be almost content.

Why something hailing itself an international, multiuser OS doesn't have that is beyond me. I would love to force the responsible people to use amharric, japanese and russian in random succession and see if they volunteer to implement it afterwards.

<edit>I forgot to mention, that you should realy turn off the global hotkeys for switching the ime, or you'll likely hit alt shift sometimes and be confused why your layout changes by itself.</edit>

AutoTools History explained by its author

David MacKenzie explains how the autotools came to pass and why some of it looks like it does in the comments to this readworthy post.

Rotating a single page in latex output

If you want to rotate a page (not just the content, i.e. you also change the geometry of that page!) the following is one possible solution: 

\documentclass{article} 

\begin{document}
  text

  \pagebreak[4]
  \global\pdfpageattr\expandafter{\the\pdfpageattr/Rotate 90}
  text\end{document}