Next month: December 2003
One unique feature I'm pleased about with the new code is the ability to check Daily Play draws for a particular day of the week (Monday to Saturday) in addition to checking all draws - I don't think any other Daily Play online ticket checker has that. Oh, if you read yesterday's entry, I did fix all the issues listed there.
I also took the opportunity to tweak the RKL random numbers ticket generation code to make sure that it doesn't loop indefinitely (it will try 1,000 times to generate a ticket that conforms, but if it doesn't, it will use the last non-conforming ticket it generated).
As a final bonus today, I've added a Daily Play Best Performing Tickets page into the Numerical Analysis section. This currently only takes about 15 seconds to generate, but has been hooked into the automatic Daily Play results grabbing as well (when the full results including the prize amounts and winners are known, the Daily Play BPT page will be re-generated without my intervention).
To amuse myself, I decided to compare my Daily Play Ticket Checker with the official site's version (you'll need to click on the DAILY PLAY red tab to get to the official Daily Play checker). Let's have a table of features:
Feature | My checker | Official checker |
---|---|---|
Multiple tickets? | Yes, up to 42 | No, one at a time |
Oldest draw check? | Draw 1 (22nd Sep 2003) | Only 4 weeks back (Early Oct 2003) |
Check less than 7 numbers per ticket? | Yes, between 1 and 7 | No, must be 7 numbers |
Indicates how much won? | Yes, both per draw and overall | No, only shows number of matches |
Shows number of Lucky Dips "won"? | Yes, both per draw and overall | No |
I think it speaks for itself - the official Daily Play ticket checker is pretty awful :-( Sadly, it's a similar story for the official ticket checkers for other games too...
I'll be working on the above over the next few days and hope to have something ready to launch by next Wednesday.
Previous month: October 2003