What's New On These Pages: October 2005

Wednesday 26th October
Out of the blue (I can't remember any media advertising and the official site's home page made no mention of it either), Camelot seems to have changed the game tiers in their lacklustre HotPicks game (the fact they changed it after 3 years shows that they got it wrong - £7,000 for a jackpot was always hopeless).
They've added a £5 Match 1 tier and a new jackpot tier - Match 5 (£130,000). Of course, this meant some data file and coding changes, which I've now done.
Wednesday 19th October
The curl/lynx grabbing code I run for Daily Play seemed to be "sticking" in recent weeks trying to get URLs from the official site (probably their Web server taking an age to respond). To fix this, I background the curl or lynx commands and sit in a foreground loop waiting for them to finish. If they don't finish after 30 seconds, I come out of the loop and kill them off. I also no longer run the grabbing code before 9.00pm (since the draw is live on Challenge TV at 8.55pm, there's no point in running it any earlier).

Previous month: September 2005