Great Review of Web App Speed

Recently came across Drew Crawford's article on the speed of web apps, what affects it, the reasons for that and finally some quanitative analysis. This is a must read.

Make Windows use a realtime clock

First off: Markus Kuhn's classic rant about windows storing the time in local time instead of UTC and why it's dangerous and downright moronic.

Solution:
Create a DWord called RealTimeIsUniversal under

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation

and set it to 1.
Beware that there are issues which Markus Kuhn details and that you should be aware of.

TED on Depression

I really like the TED talks and try to enjoy them when I have time for it, but this one hit home for me. Andrew Solomon talks about Depression and shows various angles, being both light and deep about it at the same time. A very talented speaker and this must be my favourite so far.

make Windows IME sane

Ok I have peculiar tastes, I want a US altgr intl no-dead-keys layout with Escape instead of Capslock. Windows already ships a US intl but it has dead keys which is really not only annoying but kills productivity, but some person, that just gained a lot of karma with me, has made one. You can find it here . For the Capslock remap install sharpkeys . Additionally I use autohotkeys for the xmodmap fix and I'm almost happy.

X paste buffer analogue in Windows

There is a very great app over at http://12bytes.org/software/autoclipx that actually makes X style select paste possible. The most annoying thing is, that it only works in focused input windows. I have also played with http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/ which is actually even better but this unfortunately has the same problems as the non delaying focus switch. If it weren't for the wireless lan I'd even be willing to accept that.

Focus follows mouse under Windows

Back to Windows, many more tweaks coming I fear. Let's start with Focus follows mouse. There is an accessibility setting in the control panel but it also raises the window. If you don't want this, use regedit, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop and add 0x1 to the key UserPreferencesMask (0x41 would be FFM with raising). Documentation can be found at technet. In order to be able to use this (yes it's unusable that way), add another dword-key called ActiveWndTrkTimeout that has the timeout in miliseconds. There are a lot of guides that call it ActiveWndTrackTimeout or ActiveWindowTrackTimeout, both of which don't do anything!

Oh happy day - Biblatex with Polyglossia is nigh

A couple of days ago the fine folks over at biblatex finally fixed bug #69, which is about the usage of biblatex with polyglossia instead of bable. This means I have lost the last excuse to use babel with lualatex and can finally start into the bright future ahead without that crappy package. I was reminded of how bad it is when I put together a list of common errors we see in #latex on freenode related to babel. Well at least now I personally won't have to touch it again. Burn Babel Burn. Good Riddance!

Installation is easy and risk free if you do it in texmf-local. Worked great for me.

Latex is actually getting cleaner code wise with all these modern packages like fontspec, biblatex+biber, polyglossia, glossaries+xindy,