What's New On These Pages: May 2005

Next month: June 2005

• Saturday 28th May
  Just had yet another (my 4th or 5th) long argument with the interactive phone line people about the "missing' UK winners info from the official site's Euro Millions Prize Breakdown page. Still got stonewalled, so I threw in the complaint about the fact that they shut down the main Lotto online purchases at 7.30pm on draw night (fair enough, since that's when the Lotto terminals close their sales too), but then don't seem to open them up again until the following morning !

  Now, I know that the "real-life" terminals don't start selling until 6.00am, but I'm confused as to why the online equivalent can't open up again at, say, midnight. Yes, I know that the results are still "unofficial" at that point, but the only time I think that an error in such results might matter is if they announced the wrong number of jackpot winners (encouraging people to buy a ticket for the rollover, who otherwise wouldn't), but that's never happened yet in over a decade.

  What really got my goat though, is the point at which they stop you playing if their online main Lotto sales are closed. They shouldn't display a playslip to put your numbers in (but they do) and they shouldn't accept the playslip form and display the numbers/weeks/draw days and total cost after submitting the playslip (but they do). Yes, you've guessed it, only when you click on the final "Buy" button does it tell you the online sales are closed! Even worse than that, they don't tell you when they'll be open either! Imagine if Amazon did that when you go to buy something - there'd be rioting in the streets :-)

• Friday 27th May
  The official Luxembourg Euro Millions site's results page shifted its full URL this week (but remained at the same top-level Web address). It doesn't make too much difference really, because the official Swiss site tends to get the numbers first (unsurprising, because they currently host the draw).

  Modified the "mini balls" code for the home page so that instead of using only 10 image filenames (numbered 0 to 9) for each type of draw's mini balls (meaning they'd be re-used every 5 weeks, possibly risking being cached from a previous visit), I've now switched that to 100 images (so they will be re-used every 100 draws...i.e. about once a year).

• Thursday 26th May
  Bought two more tickets (online) for Saturday's single rollover draw, but I was annoyed that the online purchases are closed after about 11.00pm BST and I had to wait until today to buy them - why?! I'm also down to zero balance in my online account, having spent my initial £6 I transferred in.

• Thursday 19th May
  Switched my work build machine for lottery pages to a faster HP-UX PA-RISC box, so this should mean that page generation following any draw is now about 4 times faster (which should stop people coming into the chat room and wondering if a draw has actually taken place !).

  I don't think I'll be able to get the HP-UX code any faster now, so the next speed up will come from changing the hosting from HP-UX to Linux, which I'm planning to do in the near future once a couple of technical hurdles have been overcome (like ImageMagick issues with its buggy montage command for one thing...).

• Saturday 7th May
  Bought two additional tickets online (via the official site of course) for next Wednesday's single rollover draw. It struck me that the final page before I spent the £2 did not tell me the dates of the draws it would be entered for (just the days of the week and the number of weeks) and yet the page after I spent the money did tell me the draw dates! Surely it should tell you those dates before you purchase? Something to notify Camelot about I reckon...

Previous month: April 2005

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