Press "Enter" to skip to content

Richy's Random Ramblings

Who was in Victoria Wood with all the Trimmings

December 24, 2012
Comments closed

After watching “Victoria Wood with all the Trimmings” last night, I wondered how many actors had been in Doctor Who, Eastenders and Coronation Street (three extremely popular UK TV shows) and therefore, being the geek I am, decided to find out.

It turns out (according to the IMDB and a Google Spreadsheet: where the formula “=CONCATENATE((ROW()-1)-COUNTBLANK(F2:F54),”/”,ROW()-1)” came in handy), that out of the 54 credited actors, 14 (25.92%) were in Dr Who, 11 (20.37%) in Coronation Street and 6 (11.11%) were in Eastenders (with some in two of the three shows). Quite a hefty overlap!

Actor Dr Who Eastenders Coronation Street
Victoria Wood
Caroline Aherne
Bruce Alexander Mr Burgess
Susie Blake Bev Unwin
James Bolam Sir Achibald Flint (audio book: The Spectre of Lanyon Moor
Betty Boothroyd
June Brown Eleanor (The Time Warrior) Dot Cotton
Richenda Carey
Craig Cash
Helen Coker
Roger Cook
Lindsay Duncan Adelaide Brooke (The Waters of Mars)
Andrew Dunn Max (Scream of the Shalka) Roger Stiles / Laurie Dyson
Richard E. Grant “The Doctor (The Curse of Fatal Death)
The Doctor (Scream of the Shalka)
Doctor Simeon (The Snowmen)”
Hannah Gordon Kirsty McClaren (The Highlanders)
Shobna Gulati Ameena Sunita Alahan / Parekh
Charlie Hicks
Nichola Holt
Adrian Hood
Celia Imrie
Philip Jackson Smitty
Derek Jacobi Professor Yana (Utopia)
Hugh Laurie
Robert Lindsay
Geraldine McEwan
Bob Monkhouse
Deborah Moore
Roger Moore
Michael Parkinson
Bill Paterson Bracewell (Victory of the Daleks / Pandorica Opens)
Maxine Peake Belinda Peach
Billie Piper Rose Tyler (2005-2010)
Pete Postlethwaite Detective Sergeant Cross
Anne Reid Florence Finnegan (Smith and Jones) Valerie Barlow / Tatlock
Alan Rickman
Paul Rider Howard
Angela Rippon
Amy Robbins
Emma Robbins
Kate Robbins
Ted Robbins Officer McAlister / DJ
Delia Smith
Kathy Staff Vera Hopkins / Customer
Joe Starrs
Imelda Staunton Interface (The Girl Who Waited)
Alan Titchmarsh
Julie Walters
Ian “H” Watkins
Jim Watson
Honeysuckle Weeks
Penelope Wilton Harriet Jones (2005-2008)
Anna Wing Anatta (Kinda: Part One) Lou Beale
Bernard Wrigley Chauffeur / Comedian
Totals 14/54 6/54 11/54

Lots of post from Halifax

December 22, 2012
Leave a Comment

I’ve just closed my ISA Investor with Halifax (well, now it’s HBOS Investment Fund Managers Limited) as I’ve been unhappy with their service since the Lloyds TSB takeover (who I actually left, after 25 years, about 6 years ago as I was unhappy with their deteriorating service!). So Halifax/HBOS sent me “contract note[s] for the sale of shares from your ISA Investor”.

One for each of the individual investment trusts. So that’s 13 contract notes.

All in their own envelopes.

All with their own (UKMail) postage paid.

All with the sale deal reference number, deal date, deal time and customer account number.

And they still hadn’t updated my name correctly from early September when I went into the branch and mid-November when I telephoned them (one of the reasons for closing the accounts I have with them is their inability to be update things accurately).

I honestly don’t think Halifax will be around in 10 years time if they continue like this.

Techy: rSync and scp over different ports

December 21, 2012
Leave a Comment

If you want to copy a file over scp using a different port number than usual, the syntax is:

Assume 1234 is the port number
scp -P 1234 user@remotehost:/folder/file.txt .

And if you want to do the same in rsync over SSH, then the syntax is:
rsync -av --progress -e "ssh -p 1234" user@remotehost:/folder/file.txt .

Note the different capitalisation of the port specifier (“p” is rsync’s ssh connection and “P” in scp).

Techy: Linux Mint: Where now?

December 20, 2012
Comments closed

For just over the past year, I have been running Linux Mint 12 (“Lisa”) 64bit on my HP Pavilion dv7-6103ea laptop. The only problems I’ve had are the graphics drivers (installing and upgrading the drivers for the AMD Radeon 6545G2 card gives me a black screen and I have to somehow boot Linx, remove the Catalyst drivers, reboot, try and install them and hope), the AVerMedia USB TV card not working at first (it’s working now and I don’t think I changed anything: although the remote doesn’t seem to work) and the fingerprint scanner not working.

Anyway – it’s time for me to upgrade my Operating System, but what to? The choices for the OS I have are:
* Stay on Linux Mint 12 and slowly get out of date and be disappointed that Steam (for Linux) and World of Warcraft (under Wine) won’t work. It’ll become obsolete in April 2013.
* Upgrade to the latest version of Linux Mint : 14 “Nadia” which only be supported until April 2014, but was only released in November 2012. Will require entire reinstall, but a new upgrade will be available in around April.
* Upgrade to the latest “long term support” version of Linux Mint: 13 “Maya” which will be supported until April 2017, but was released in July 2012. Will require entire reinstall, but a new upgrade will be available sometime before 2017.
* Switch to Linux Mint Debian edition which has “rolling updates” (so no need to reinstall on updates), however might not be so stable as the “Ubuntu based Mint”. Meant to be more responsive/faster, but less desktop ready. Will require entire reinstall, but just once.

But then I’ve also got the choice:
* Reinstall over the existing Linux Mint install – giving me “no way back”
* Make a new partition on either my “Linux hard drive” or “Windows hard drive” and put the new OS there
* Replace an existing hard drive with an SSD card (I’m currently using 83G of space on my Linux drive). A 128Gb card will cost £70+vat, 256Gb, £125+vat and 512Gb £253+vat.
* Get a new internal hard drive. For a straight-replacement of the 750Gb HD, it’ll be £65+vat

Any suggestions?

Full machine specification for the record

Continue ReadingTechy: Linux Mint: Where now?

Magento: Get customers ordered by order value

December 17, 2012
Leave a Comment

Want to know which of your Magento e-commerce shopping cart customers have ordered the most this year? Well, I’ve written the following SQL query to help:

SELECT SUM(sales_flat_order.base_total_invoiced) AS totalvalue,sales_flat_order.customer_firstname,sales_flat_order.customer_lastname,sales_flat_order.customer_email,sales_flat_order_address.street,sales_flat_order_address.city,sales_flat_order_address.region,sales_flat_order_address.postcode FROM sales_flat_order,sales_flat_order_address WHERE sales_flat_order.state='complete' AND sales_flat_order.created_at>'2012-01-01' AND sales_flat_order_address.entity_id=sales_flat_order.billing_address_id GROUP BY sales_flat_order.customer_email ORDER BY totalvalue DESC