What's New On These Pages: September 2016

Next month: October 2016

• Thursday 29th September
  I was a bit surprised to receive a personal e-mail fom Camelot today, who must be fans of my site because they spotted I hadn't realised that the 3+2 and 4+0 match Euro Millions row information had swapped over because the former now pays out more than the latter after Tuesday's new prize structure kicked in.

  I checked the Irish lottery site (one of the first places to display full results) and they've also flipped the rows (important, because I often pick up the pan-European info from them). Luckily, the code was only a 2-line change because I'd done something similar for lower rows when they changed the structure from draw 379 onwards.

  BTW, I should check if they got any "winnings less than stake" contigency for Euro Millions 2+0 match now because it only won £2.60 on Tuesday!

  Added more code to fix the Euro Millions ticket checker w.r.t. 3+2 and 4+0 match prize amounts - they needed to be swapped over as well (i.e. it was wrongly showing the 3+2 prize for 4+0 match and vice versa).

• Wednesday 28th September
  I was looking at the pan-European Euro Millions ticket sales figures for all draws and noticed a couple of old draws didn't have any sales figures. One draw was a typo in my data file (an extra space shifted fields) and was therefore trivial to fix.

  However, a draw from March 2014 had no ticket sales figures at all and the Portuguese site page where I get the figures from only shows recent draws from 2016. It turns out that I had to do some detective work with the URL loaded when you change draws - the draw ID was bizarrely encoded in the thousands. Yes, the site does store all the Euro Millions data going back to the beginning, but refuses to show you anything older!

  After some inspired ID guessing, I eventually found the page I was looking for. The sales figures were entered into my data file and my version of the page re-generated with the sales figures in it.

• Tuesday 27th September
  Increased the number of Euro Millions Lucky Stars balls from 11 to 12 to cope with tonight's draw revamp. This meant I had to generate a couple of ball images (small and large) for the new Lucky Star 12.

  Whilst I was in Euro Millions coding mood, I fixed a very long-standing bug w.r.t. matching wins. Ever since 2+0 became a prize, I hadn't adjusted the array I used for matching prizes to cope with the extra tier, so it wouldn't announce 2+0 as a prize and probably got higher tiers wrong too.

  Note that I'll no longer be announcing my ticket purchases on this page - they never belonged in What's New anyway because they weren't a change to the site.

Previous month: August 2016




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