What's New On These Pages: July 1995

Next month: August 1995

• Monday 31st July
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #37. Slightly adjusted balls containing the digit "1" so that they were better centred. Yep, it's the last day before the big move to another server...

• Saturday 29th July
  ITV teletext were being awkward by using "MILLION!" as a separate word following the approximate jackpot value (11.3), which foxed my automatic parsing code. I've now adjusted it to handle this. Perhaps I was "lucky" then that the Computing Services Department switched off the teletext service yet again and frustrated my auto-updates.

• Friday 28th July
  Major redesign of the pages, including the use of ALIGN=center attribute to centre paragraphs, headings and images - this works OK on arena and netscape, so at least 2 browsers understand it ! The home page is now completely centred and I've removed horizontal lines from most of the pages. I've shortened the links on the home page so that they fit on only three lines - when there's enough screen estate free, I want a clickable graphic on the home page to handle the links and the text links will be then reduced in font size (<H5> or something similar).

  Created a new index page for the winning numbers, so that I could reduce it down to a link on the home page. Increased GIF cache on the new server to 16MB, since there's plenty of filestore (nearly 4GB) available there. The old (current) server still has a GIF cache of 8MB, but I will wind that down after 1st August.

• Tuesday 25th July
  Well, that's it for The Liverpool Daily Post - no more interviews for them after they used the infamous dreadful photo for the third time in an article on Page 7. They called me a "lottery wizard" this time instead of "lottery king". Ho hum - no doubt there'll be another 6 weeks of skitting from my colleagues about that too. BBC 1's You Decide, hosted by Jeremy Paxman, spent 50 minutes debating the pros and cons of the UK National Lottery and ended up wasting everyone's time by having a 50%-50% phone vote at the end as to whether the lottery was good or bad !

• Monday 24th July
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #36. Increased the minimum prize cutoff to 7 prizes on the most prizes won page, because the 6-wins ticket list was getting too long. Adjusted footer countdown - I was rounding down the number of days left, which meant it was a day out ! Widened the Total column in the total prizes page because the total prize payouts have now exceeded £1 billion. Added another mail check at 8.00am on Monday morning because it seems the Computing Services Department reactivate their teletext service just before then.

  Oh dear, the Liverpool Daily Post just won't go away ! It looks like I might be featuring for the second time [third time if you include its sister Echo paper] in this local newspaper - they phoned me up for yet another interview. I told them that they really don't need a photo of me [especially after using a dreadful one on Page 3] - why can't they just use some screen shots of the lottery pages like anyone with any sense would ? If they publish that awful photo again, I will refuse any further interviews with them.

• Saturday 22nd July
  The Computing Services Department predictably switched off their teletext service, so no auto-updates again...

• Friday 21st July
  Synchronised the old and new locations of the lottery pages to within 30 seconds of each other by sending e-mail from the update script if any pages change - this in turns sparks off mirroring of the pages across the two servers.

• Tuesday 18th July
  Added a new How To Run A Syndicate page, extracted - with extra personal comments - from the Playing In A Group leaflet Camelot released last week. I had to phone Camelot up and get them to send me the leaflet - nowhere in Liverpool had it ! Ditched the striped line graphic that borders newsflashes - it's somewhat superfluous and allows me to consider a new third graphic on the home page instead.

• Monday 17th July
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #35. The total ticket sales for the 35 weeks exceeded 2^31, so I've been moving some of the variables and output routines over to double-precision floating point (adding 0.5 to calculations to avoid precision errors). Previously, I'd been using ints/longs (both mean the same on UNIX). Fixed a minor bug in rounding in the table versions of the winning number lists (I added 5 instead of 0.5 to round up !!).

  ITV's World In Action really laid into the UK National Lottery tonight. Most of their points were valid (though tackily presented), but they totally missed the mark with interviews with a couple of blokes from a 10-strong syndicate who won Lottery #9's jackpot and only ended up with £12,000 each. This was a completely freak result that the TV documentary really hyped up. Of the 28 non-rollover lotteries so far, there have been 74 millionaires created - an average of more than 2.5 per non-rollover lottery, so you are very likely to become a millionaire if you win the jackpot.

  I did agree with their point about the lack of a Quick Pick button on lottery terminals, but I think it would be useful more for the convenience of the general public than anything else. World In Action were trying to imply that it would reduce the number of unused combinations (therefore less rollovers and lower average ticket sales), which is possibly true, but we currently have a 5 to 1 ratio of ticket sales to combinations, so I don't think that would have as a big an impact as the show claimed.

• Saturday 15th July
  The teletext mail arrived at 8.34pm and the 8.35pm job only just caught it. I've moved next Saturday's first mail-out forward another minute to 8.05pm. Apart from that, everything went smoothly for a change.

• Friday 14th July
  Fixed pluralisation error in the Notes section of winning number tables - it didn't say "...main numbers are..." when more than one number was tied at the top of the frequency table - it previously incorrectly stated "...main number is...". Highlighted the jackpot in bold in the winning number tables if it was a Super Draw.

• Wednesday 12th July
  Duplicated yesterday's page move to another username with the live pages this time. Luckily, I knew the major pitfalls and was ready for them ! Looking at the mail filtering problem, I think it'll have to wait until I close down the old pages on 1st September (there are complicated reasons for the delay, but basically it would mean coding temporary kludges that I'd have to rewrite in September).

  Mail filtering would mean that within 5 seconds of the teletext mail server mailing back the results on a Saturday evening, the home page and appropriate individual lottery page would be automatically updated. At the moment, I'm playing cat-and-mouse: guessing when the teletext mail will come back and setting up multiple cron jobs to try and catch it - not a good solution.

• Tuesday 11th July
  On my home machine, I moved the lottery pages from my filestore to another new username so I can completely separate the lottery goodies from my other WWW bits'n'pieces. It went surprisingly smoothly and the reason for the move is so that when I do it tomorrow on the live system, I don't get weekend lottery e-mail in my own personal mailbox and it will also allow me to experiment with mail filtering under the new user without worrying if I cock up it completely [there's no way I could test under my own user with a high risk of losing any (non-lottery-related) incoming e-mail...].

• Monday 10th July
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #34. Moved the "Bonus" and "Ball" strings in the 7-ball GIFs one pixel higher/lower so that they don't "crowd" the bonus ball. Redesigned the logo at the top of the pages yet again - it's not as tall (the inner box has been removed) and it now has an embedded Union Jack. Despite the extra "detail", it's still only 1.5K...

• Saturday 8th July
  Despite mailing at 8.07pm (the earliest since the draw moved to 8.13pm), the teletext mail took even longer to arrive (came back at 8.32pm). I've now added an 8.35pm cron job to catch these sorts of delays, plus I've moved the mail-out back a minute to 8.06pm.

• Friday 7th July
  Due to a mis-configuration of the network at our end (for a change !), network connections were lost between 3.15pm and 5.15pm. Everything's OK now though.

• Thursday 6th July
  To the end-user, the hacks to the lottery C code I slaved over today produce exactly the same output as the old code did ! However, the code can now handle more than one lottery a week - the results data file now uses day offsets from Lottery #1 (i.e. 0, 7, 14, 21 etc.) rather than actual dates. This also allows me to simplify the expiry boundary check, which would have been impossible prior to the data file format change if there was more than one lottery a week or if the draw day changed from Saturday.

  The code and data file changes are in advance of a possible switch to 2 lotteries a week - an idea Camelot are currently considering. I no longer hard-code the time zone into the lottery binaries - it's picked up via strftime()/localtime(). I reformatted my SyQuest cartridge (with fewer inodes to increase the space available) to hopefully avoid future problems, but I may end up having to mediainit it.

• Wednesday 5th July
  Temporarily added a newsflash and page for a TV researcher who's doing a documentary for Channel 4 on the lottery and wants "interesting lottery stories" (e.g. people spending their life savings on tickets etc. etc). Added a new Commercial Lottery Sites page, mainly because they've started to crop up in significant numbers, plus it's probably about time I listed shareware and commercial lottery software, much against my better judgement since you've got to be extremely gullible to actually buy lottery software...

• Tuesday 4th July
  Bought a second ticket for the rollover. Discovered that the US magazine Internet World did a feature on gambling on the Internet and mentioned my pages as the first URL in a gambling article for the July 1995 issue !

• Monday 3rd July
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #33. Removed the dull Daily Post article. Added some links to various pages from the synopsis page. Added a new prize structure page, which was split off from the About The Lottery page and further expanded to cover some quite complicated inter-category rollover rules. Adjusted rollover formula used to calculated estimated jackpot pool - it's now (rollover amount+1m)*2, rounded down to the nearest million. This closely fits the last 5 rollovers, so I'm happy with it - it estimates a potential £19m jackpot for Lottery #34.

• Saturday 1st July
  Ho hum, the Computing Services Department switched off their teletext mail server yet again and didn't bring it back online until 7.55am on Monday morning, so no auto-updates as usual :-(

Previous month: June 1995

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