I recently moved to New York, leaving most of my belongings back in Australia, since many people keep asking me about where I bought things, I thought I should make a list of the products that I’d buy again…

From Amazon (including gratuitous use of affiliate links)

• Air Mattress (until bed frame and mattress arrived) - Intex Raised Downy Queen Airbed with Built-in Electric Pump
• Hot Water - Panasonic NC-EH22PC 2.3 Quart Electric Thermo Hot Water Pot, White
• Crock-pot - Hamilton Beach 33967 Set ‘n Forget 6-Quart Programmable Slow Cooker
• Saucepans - T-fal A821SA94 Initiatives Nonstick Inside and Out Dishwasher Safe 10-Piece Cookware Set, Black
• Baking Sheet (quite long, you should measure your oven before purchasing) - Nordic Ware Bakers Half Sheet, 13 by 18 by 1 Inch
• Cutlery - Oneida Mooncrest 45-Piece Flatware Set, Service for 8
• Cutlery Tray - Madesmart 15.875 by 12.75 by 1.875-Inch Large Silverware Tray, Granite
• Drinking Glasses - Libbey Polaris Drinking Glasses and Tumblers, Set of 16
• Misc. Kitchen Utensils - Calphalon Nylon 4-Piece Utensil Set
• Can Opener + Bottle Opener - OXO SoftWorks Can Opener
• Whisk - OXO Good Grips Nylon Balloon Whisk
• Measuring Spoons - Progressive International Stainless-Steel Magnetic Measuring Spoons, Set of 5
• Mixing Bowls - OXO Good Grips 3-Piece Mixing Bowl Set, Blue/Green/Yellow
• Dining Table - Crown Mark Tyler 4-Piece Counter Height Table Set
• Bed underlay (this made a very cheap mattress ridiculously comfortable) - Pinzon Basics Overfilled Ultra Soft Microplush Queen Mattress Pad
• Doona Cover - Perry Ellis, Sweet Bay Collection Duvet Set, Full/Queen
• Coat Hangers - Closet Complete Ultra Thin No Slip Velvet Suit Hangers, Black, Set of 50
• Laundry Basket - Rubbermaid 4D06 Configurations 23-Inch Foldable Laundry Hamper, Natural
• Vacuum Cleaner - Dirt Devil Dynamite Bagless Upright with On-Board Tools - M084650RED
• Curtains - Solid Thermal Insulated Blackout Curtain 84"L- 1 Set-BLACK
• Screwdrivers - Titan 17237 Insulated Electrical Screwdriver Set - 7 Piece

Shipping from amazon is fast and usually well packed; this is not true for furniture though, and I strongly advise purchasing anything over 20kg elsewhere, the dining table had to be delivered three times before I got one that hadn’t been damaged in shipping.

From Totally Furniture

• Bed frame, chest of drawers and night-stand - http://www.totallyfurniture.com/mfi-modusneviscollectionespressofinish.html

From Walmart (Online)

• TV - LG 47LM4600 47" 1080p 120Hz 3D LED (1.4" ultra-slim) HDTV
• Second chest of drawers (matches totally furniture set) - Modus Furniture International Nevis Lingerie Chest, Espresso

Made myself a nice new bash prompt using lua. Code can be found in this gist.

I started off trying to set PS1, but bash will incorrectly calcuate the prompt length. This leaves you with strange line wrapping behaviour. Thanks to Rob Hoelz I found out about PROMPT_COMMAND, which allows you to run a command before PS1 is printed.

I used ljsyscall to avoid as many new processes as possible, they could be replaced by commands if you want.

To get the git and mercurial (hg) status, I had to call out to see if the current directory is inside a repository: this can sometimes be slow, as git and hg have to traverse the whole way up the directory tree stat-ing for .git and .hg folders.

EDIT: Using PROMPT_COMMAND caused issues when scrolling through history, or pressing backspace at the beginning of a line. From the #bash IRC channel I found out that you can inform bash of non-printing characters by wrapping the bytes in \1 and \2. The gist has been updated.

I’m excited to be going to the lua workshop this year.

If you’re going, make sure we have a chat!

Most of the time when programming in C, your API IS your ABI; but there are various cases where use of a pre-processor will break this symmetry.

I should be able to interface with your library without running a pre-processor over the headers first.

All the guides to getting ffmpeg working on windows seem to be extremely outdated; so here is a quick howto:

1. Download mingw
2. Install mingw with MSYS option; it will download and setup in C:\MinGW
3. Get the mingw coreutils extra package (can be found from here); current version
4. Install the coreutils extras package by un-7zipping and un-tarring it to C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\bin
5. Download yasm; save it as C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\bin\yasm.exe
6. Download and extract ffmpeg source (I used revision 647ec6f)
7. Edit your C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\etc\fstab file to add the location of your ffmpeg source
8. Open MinGW shell (it should be in your start menu)
9. change to the directory you extract ffmpeg (going via the alias you added in fstab)
10. ./configure
11. make