What's New On These Pages: September 2002

Next month: October 2002

• Saturday 28th September
  No problems in the lottery chat room tonight, though as usual, more people turned up after the draws than during it. The main draw's lottery numbers were quite low tonight, so it was surprising that there was no main lottery jackpot winners. BBC teletext seemed to be the first to the full results (even if they got the number of 3+Thunderball winners wrong) with the official Web site a close second and the Camelot phone line trailing a good 20-25 minutes behind those two.

  Talking of the official site, they have a faulty way of representing the jackpot tier when there's no jackpot winner - they say there's no winners (correct), £0 per winner (incorrect) and, er, £4,855,501 (incorrect) awarded to the jackpot winners. This also messed up their total prize pool line in the table, which of course was incorrectly boosted by £4.8m to £17,762,175. I told Camelot on the phone about this, but I doubt it'll get fixed.

• Wednesday 25th September
  Unsurprisingly, the chat room was very quiet tonight because the BBC randomly schedules the Wednesday lottery TV show nowadays - this time the dice rolled and we got a 7.55pm draw (the earliest for a long time on a Wednesday and a full 2 hours before last Wednesday's !). No problems with the live TV show commentary and draw, even if it was to an empty room (people started to drift in after the show had finished).

  Meanwhile, the official lottery site, whilst actually being available and working for a change on a draw night [thanks to the early draw no doubt] dismally failed to put the winning numbers up for either draw for a full 50 minutes [in fact, I wonder if my complaining phone call to Camelot kicked them into life]. They did at least have the full results up first, only about 10 minutes after they put the numbers up ! BBC teletext was second, with Camelot's phone line trailing in last as they usually do.

• Saturday 21st September
  It wasn't hugely busy in the chat room tonight, but those who turned up saw quite low main Lotto numbers (and 11 main jackpot winners) during my live TV show commentary and draws. The official site actually managed to hold up reasonably well tonight for a change and they duly got the full results up fairly quickly (about 35 minutes after the draw). BBC teletext were slow and the Camelot phone line were even worse (almost 90 minutes to get the full results !).

• Wednesday 18th September
  The late draw (pointlessly delayed an hour because of a "crime night" on BBC 1 - the show could have easily have been slotted inbetween those programmes) meant that the usual late stragglers remained in the chat room and we had users into the double figures for the live draw, which went fine.

  The official lottery Web site was as creakingly slow as usual and eventually capitulated to the now-familar "Internal Server Error" pages (yes, including the home page !) for about 5 minutes. Once that subsided, the full results actually were loadable, with the Camelot phone line getting them almost the same time. BBC teletext, meanwhile, unusually failed to have any prize/winners at all by 11.00pm (when the Camelot phone line shut).

• Tuesday 17th September
  Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's Super Draw.

• Saturday 14th September
  No problems tonight for the chat room commentary and draw, although there weren't a lot of people in the room at the time. The official site got the full results first, followed by BBC teletext, with the Camelot phone line trailing in last place as seems to be the case nowadays.

• Wednesday 11th September
  When I checked with Camelot last week, they said the (untelevised) lottery draws would take place at about 9.00pm BST tonight, but obviously they told a big porky pie to me. The phone line said they got the full results at around 8.00pm (which means the draw must taken place only a few minutes after the terminals closed at 7.30pm).

  I decided to check BBC teletext at 8.45pm and was very annoyed to find out that the winning numbers were up at that point and they'd announced no jackpot winners for the main draw (though they didn't have the full results at that point). I duly updated the site and got the rest of the info from the official Web site and also double-checked it via the phone line once I'd calmed down and phoned them :-) I didn't do any chat room duty because of the lack of a TV show (quite why the BBC showed a documentary instead of the lottery show is anyone's guess).

• Saturday 7th September
  No problems with the lottery TV show commentary or draw tonight in the chat room and the official Web site even stayed up long enough for me to pick up the full results from it some 50 minutes after the draw (BBC teletext came second and the phone line came third). Apart from Alan Dedicoat ("the Voice of the Balls") mentioning that it was the 700th main Lotto draw, not a lot was made of that fact on the TV show.

  Looking at my TV mag for next Wednesday, it suddenly dawned on me that there was no lottery TV show ! Instead we get an unwelcome repeat of that awful Dawn French comedy vehicle known as The Vicar of Dibley, followed by a 9/11 documentary about the events of a year ago. So next Wednesday's draw will be done off-camera at around 9.00pm, so it'll be a panic to get the winning numbers...

• Wednesday 4th September
  For some completely unfathomable reason, BBC 1 saw it fit to show a terrestrial repeat of the absolutely dreadful Lost in Space movie at national prime time, which managed to push the lottery TV show back an hour to 9.55pm, a mere 65 minutes before Camelot phone lines closed for the evening ! Such "late" lottery shows at least manage to attract more people in the chat room for the live draws [people inevitably turn up late and well after the draws if they're on at normal time].

  No problems doing the live TV show commentary and draw and, as seems to be usual nowadays, the official Camelot Web site overloaded and either refused connections or produced an "Internal Server Error" for a full hour after the draws ! I complained bitterly about this to Camelot (since the hour after the draw is indeed the time people want to know the numbers and the full results) and they will supposedly inform their IT department.

  FYI, it appears that the official site uses IBM hardware (RS/6000 possibly ?) running AIX and an IBM-branded release of the Apache Web server software. The Web pages appear to be mostly dynamically generated [yes, even the home page], which is a crucial mistake - many of those pages only change twice a week, so it's ludicrous to constantly use CPU to produce a dynamic page each time. Whatever content management system they've got clearly needs to know the concept of generating static pages wherever possible - as it stands, the site basically falls over whenever demand rises, which is hopeless.

  Anyway, I used a combo of BBC teletext and the Camelot phone line to get most of the full results up about 50 minutes after the draw, but the Camelot phone line couldn't give me the Extra draw prize pool or ticket sales because their lines closed before they had the info ! Luckily, just as the phone lines closed at 11.00pm, the official site's demand-crashed server sprung into life [people obviously gave up !] and I managed to glean the missing info from there.

Previous month: August 2002

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