What's New On These Pages: January 1995

Next month: February 1995

• Tuesday 31st January
  Split up the old prize analysis page into three separate ones and added a total ticket sales column to one of them. Added the reason why your selected numbers don't conform to my number selection strategy.

• Monday 30th January
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #11. Also got the total ticket sales for every lottery so far from the Camelot phone line, so I'll be rolling these into the analysis pages at some point.

• Saturday 28th January
  Received two booklets from Camelot - The Player Code Of Practice and the Rules For On-Line Games And The National Lottery Procedures. Based on these and other queries I've had, I've started a Frequently Asked Questions list.

• Thursday 26th January
  I discovered I have a rival (now defunct) to my pages, but apart from a dinkier random number generator (which will force me to upgrade mine I suspect), it's still some way short of my pages. Put the 49-element grid inside a <PRE> section to allow an extra space (or spaces) to separate each number. Meant adjustment to some of my code as well.

• Wednesday 25th January
  Added a black outline to the balls to stop white balls appearing invisible when a page is printed out ! Also moved the numbers inside the balls one pixel to the right for better centreing. Ho hum, it looks like Camelot can't put me on their press mailing list because it's primitively faxed to the BBC and to a news agency and nowhere else. I asked about electronic mail, but they don't have any external e-mail at the moment and there's always the question of security of course.

• Tuesday 24th January
  Sadly, Camelot have refused permission for me to use the official National Lottery logo, but I might take this higher to Oflot, since they are the ones who actually own the logo. In the meantime, I'll guess I'll have to design a better logo than the temporary one currently there - Camelot reckoned I couldn't even do a logo similar to their own !

  Finally removed the concept of "this week" and "last week" by moving the latest lottery page straight into the archive area. Added an "automatically generated" footer to appropriate pages, which links to a new page describing the hardware and software I'm using for the pages.

• Monday 23rd January
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #10. Wrote an X Windows program to generate a window containing the 7 balls drawn for a particular week, which is then screen dumped to a transparent gif. All individual lottery pages now include a gif of the appropriate 7 balls, including the top-level page.

• Monday 16th January
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #9 - it looks like the only place you're guaranteed to get the full results is option 4 on the Camelot phone line (0645 100 000). Used "spell -b" to fix various spelling mistakes in existing docs, including the word "millennium", which I kept spelling with one "n" !

• Tuesday 10th January
  Put more info (prize allocation algorithm at last !) in the About page - may split this up eventually into other pages. Confirmed the prize amounts and the number of winners for Lottery #8 by phoning Camelot on their helpline (0645 100 000). Added average number of winners line to the prize analysis page - I may soon split this page into three separate pages as well. Mat Newman reduced his "guarantee a win" lottery wheel by one to 174 tickets. He thinks the optimal number is somewhere between 120 and 150 tickets, but the "theoretical" minimum is 83 tickets according to Steiner Coverings theories.

• Monday 9th January
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #8. Added a Where The Money Goes section to the About page.

• Wednesday 4th January
  Created a new sub-directory of What's New pages and split them into quarterly HTML docs.

• Tuesday 3rd January
  Uploaded the results of Lottery #7. Added new page of links to other Lottery Results pages. If anyone knows of any links that can be added to that page, please e-mail me.

• Monday 2nd January
  Was phoned up (at home !) by the guy I wrote to at Camelot. He explained that things should be OK w.r.t. getting logo permission and it should be confirmed in about a fortnight. Had a dreadful photo published in the Liverpool Echo: I don't have a double chin (honest)...it was the way they scrunched me up to the monitor and keyboard to supposedly make sure that photo cropping would be OK (more likely it was to embarrass me - I can't believe the photographer didn't mention that it looked like I had grown a second chin :-( ).

  Had a seriously difficult time getting the full results for Lottery #7 - the Daily Telegraph today was hopeless (a tiny paragraph in the "In Brief" section) and even teletext (ITV page 123) got the number of winners wrong by transposing digits on the 3 match winners !

Previous month: December 1994

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