What's New On These Pages: March 1995

Next month: April 1995

• Wednesday 29th March
  Increased GIF cache to 6MB of disk space, which keeps about 14 days of generated 7-ball GIFs.

• Tuesday 28th March
  Bought a second ticket for Lottery #20 because of the rollover, adding one to all my numbers as usual. Meanwhile, Camelot today announced that the estimated jackpot for next Saturday's draw is a potential record £19m and may even hit £20m if high sales are sustained during the week. If you're a regular reader of these What's New pages, I'll just recap that I'm still waiting for a response from ITV teletext to my letter asking for formal permission to extract the lottery numbers/jackpot pool amount from ITV teletext page 123. In the meantime, I'll continue to extract such numbers [disk faults and teletext page re-designs permitting] - you'll probably have noticed that I've added a credit to ITV teletext in the updated home page at the weekend, although last weekend they never put up the correct jackpot pool (£10.1m) !

  A little rant about teletext and the National Lottery here... Both BBC and ITV teletext departments get "spoon-fed" lottery information via the Press Association News [plus Camelot fax results directly to the BBC]. Hence, there is no excuse for the sloppiness in teletext reporting of the National Lottery that I've witnessed from day one back in November. I simply don't trust BBC/ITV teletext for correct lottery information any more and get my info from Camelot's phone line directly instead. Mind you, even Camelot don't seem to watch the live TV show because when I phone them on Sunday morning, their staff often don't know what draw machine and ball set was used (and I have to tell them...) !

• Monday 27th March
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #19. Discovered that the Personal Computer World magazine (April 1995 issue) had a photo of my lottery pages and some sarcastic comments in the write-up. First of all, PCW wondered where Camelot's "official" WWW lottery page is and the simple answer is that they aren't connected to the Internet yet and only have internal e-mail at the moment. Next, they wondered why an "academic" person would run such a set of pages for no financial gain (this is because I'm providing an information service that manipulates data from the public domain). Finally, they were mystified why I don't mention the myriad of PC lottery programs you can now buy (because they are a waste of money, that's why !).

• Saturday 25th March
  As an "after-effect" of Wednesday's disk fault, my workstation wasn't mounting the correct local software disk, so all the weekend's results updates failed to generate correct info. This problem has now been fixed and I can take a little comfort in the fact the updates would have been correct if the right disk was mounted ! ITV's teletext page 123 decided to ditch the full set of previous results, although you can just tune into BBC 2's teletext page 750 for them anyway.

• Wednesday 22nd March
  Filestore problems on the WWW server meant the CGI stuff failed. This problem has now been rectified.

• Monday 20th March
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #18. Adjusted monetary display routine to allow for values exceeding £1,000,000,000 (i.e. the ticket sales). Further adjustment to teletext parsing code to allow either a rounded or exact jackpot figure to be parsed, although I can't work around the bad updating problem easily (see below). Added a new FAQ for the Instant Scratchcard Game. Spread out the options on the forms page.

• Sunday 19th March
  The remaining ITV teletext sub-pages had the correct results finally updated, so my Sunday cron job fixed the numbers at last.

• Saturday 18th March
  ITV's teletext decided to play silly beggars and only put the results on the first sub-page, leaving last week's results on sub-page 2 onwards ! I only pick up the last sub-page's numbers, so none of the updates picked up the correct numbers :-( Teletext also decided to give the exact jackpot amount at the top of the first sub-page, rather than last week's rounded figure, so my parsing wasn't happy about that and ignored it.

• Friday 17th March
  Fixed mosaic blank table line problem (removed a <TR>).

• Monday 13th March
  Uploaded the Lottery #17 results. ITV teletext page 123 changed its "forecast" string to "prize" instead, but still failed to give the exact jackpot amount. Fixed the dropped bonus number problem and also incorporated new parsing of the #<number>m format ready for next Saturday. Added millionaire 5+bonus winners to the millionaires count (none so far, but I was only counting millionaire jackpot winners until today). Added page update cron jobs for 08.30/09.00 on Sunday morning and Monday morning.

• Saturday 11th March
  Oops - accidentally dropped the bonus number info when parsing the teletext mail in its new format, so that came out as zero ! First mail came back at 20.26, so the 20.30 update was the first to change the pages. Annoying that ITV's teletext fails to give the exact jackpot amount anymore, instead preferring to say "March 11 Jackpot forecast - #13.1m".

• Friday 10th March
  Altered teletext winning number parsing code to cope with the new page format. Have temporarily disabled the estimated jackpot pool parsing until I find out how it's displayed tomorrow on the teletext page.

• Thursday 9th March
  Added a new table version of the winning numbers page, but it was such a pain to do that I'll just do that page for the moment. It highlighted a couple of mosaic 2.5beta5 bugs with tables too.

• Tuesday 7th March
  Added individual lottery page links to both the returned page from submitting the form and also to the further draw details page. Finally got my Subscription Certificate through - one set of 6 numbers for 52 draws, starting from Lottery #19. Bought 2 tickets for this week's draw (added one to my numbers for the second ticket) because of the Super Draw.

• Monday 6th March
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #16. Aaargh - teletext lottery page 123 just changed its format during Monday afternoon to include the 7 winning numbers on EACH sub-page !! A frantic week of re-coding looks likely. Removed 20.30 Saturday teletext mailing because it used the mail server cache, rather than getting live pages. Add 20.20 and 20.25 mail reading jobs to pick up on slow mail. Added Millionaires line to the winning numbers page to indicate how many millionaires have been created by the lottery so far.

• Saturday 4rd March
  Sent off a letter to the editor of ITV's teletext asking for formal permission to automatically extract info from teletext page 123 (no, I didn't stop the automatic updates though !). Teletext mail server was a little slow, so no update until 20.30. The 20.30 mail sent out was cached by the mail server (it was 28 minutes after the first mail), so I got a fast reply, but it was the same as the 20.02 mail ! The exact jackpot pool was updated at 22.45 (the 22.00 mail picked it up).

• Thursday 2nd March
  Further enormous disruptions to the Liverpool University's external network connections meant you were lucky if you got to these pages today (not our Department's fault, I hasten to add). Ho hum...

• Wednesday 1st March
  Generated GIF cache exceeded 4MB for the first time and the daily cron job kicked in correctly to delete the oldest accessed ones and bring it under 4MB again. From the growth rate, it looks like this will happen on a daily basis now - I may have to consider upping the cache because they are only lasting 9 days at the moment ! Updated the lottery FAQ with the latest scratchcard details. External network connections for the entire campus were dead for 5 hours, wonderful huh ?

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