What's New On These Pages: April 1996

Next month: May 1996

• Tuesday 30th April
  Bought 2 more tickets for next Saturday's rollover. Remembered to adjust next week's cron jobs so that they skip Monday updates because of the UK holiday.

• Monday 29th April
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #76. The automatic draw day announcements on the next draw's individual page will no longer have "Lottery #<next draw>" linked because that was actually to a link to itself ! The link will remain on the home page version of course because that links to a different page from there. At the same time, I linked to the next draw's page in the post-draw auto-announcement placed on the virtual lottery home page. Phoned up Camelot about scratchcard info and duly adjusted the appropriate page. Fixed the lottery links pages by just re-running the code, now that our internal network isn't quite so sick.

• Saturday 27th April
  Despite the internal network chaos, the pages correctly updated at 8.06pm and again (with a £20m forecast) at 10.33pm. Pretty good considering I didn't think there'd be any updates at all this weekend. What did go wrong were the lottery links pages, which basically fell over and ended up with blank pages due to NFS trouble.

• Friday 26th April
  Definitely a candidate for "worst network day of the year" this one. One of the network switches in the Computer Science department had been intermittently faulty recently and today it decided it wasn't playing ball at all. It refused to pass on network traffic and, despite engineers being called out, nothing was satisfactorily resolved, so the day was pretty well a write-off.

  This impacted anything to do with lottery processing of course (which heavily relies on departmental NFS filestore being available), meaning the InterLotto results update failed (not that I could see what was going on, because all my prompts had hung with NFS errors). I couldn't even rlogin to the Connect server to check if it was communicating with the outside world OK !

• Thursday 25th April
  I ran my internal link checker and it picked up a misplaced link in next week's InterLotto individual page that I duly fixed. I now no longer generate GIFs for the drawn balls or the frequency charts except on a Saturday, Sunday or Monday (UK lottery) or on a Friday (InterLotto). This should stop unnecessary generation on other days, which is distracting when restoring the pages from the SyQuest drive (it has to screen dump 10 GIFs which really get in the way on my display).

  Now that the Prizes column is narrower, I've finally been able to put a Range column onto the various trivia analysis pages, which indicates the difference between the lowest and highest numbers drawn each week. Yes, utterly pointless if you ask me, but then that's why it belongs on the trivia analysis page !

  The money-grabbing VeriSign didn't e-mail us the renewed secure mode certificate, so it's now expired and we'll be chasing this one up quickly. You've got to wonder why you have to pay annually for the certificate, but they only issue it for a 6-month period at a time, leading to two sets of panic if we don't get the certificate on time, rather than a single annual frenzy. Anyway, I've now got conditional HTML (via a "SECURE" variable) that will switch certain text to avoid mentioning secure mode if we haven't got it working (er, like now) - this mainly affects the virtual lottery of course.

• Wednesday 24th April
  I was accidentally including the latest ticket sales figure into the combined sales calculations prior to the scratchcard sales info being released on a Wednesday. This skewed the combined sales figures, particularly the "Reverse Combined Sales Order" column, the total sales figure and the average sales figure. From now on, "N/A" in a row truly means that no figure for that week will be used any calculations or sales column.

  Changed all InterLotto home page links to point to a special page which allows InterLotto to track who's jumping from my pages to theirs (it redirects to the normal InterLotto home page of course). Updated the latest scratchcard sales and Lucky Dip sales figures - for the first time, I was recognised by voice on the phone by someone at Camelot !

  I've adjusted the Wins and Prizes columns in the trivia analysis pages to reflect a prior history (i.e. between lottery #1 and #(line-1)), which matches what I auto-report in each individual lottery page. It makes more sense that way because the old way of listing the entire (past, present, future) history of each jackpot ticket meant that the figures were constantly changing as newer draws emerged, rather than reflecting the success of each ticket at the time it was drawn.

• Tuesday 23rd April
  Fixed some minor problems with the auto-update system (it sometimes thought that it had results from WWW sites when it hadn't yet...and hence would refuse to re-scan them when it should). I've shifted the second e-mail request on a Saturday evening back one minute to 8.02pm, just to separate it from the 8.00pm request (both requests have been returning with the same teletext e-mail for several weeks now).

• Monday 22nd April
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #75. Adjusted the TV show FAQ to mention Bob Monkhouse as the current main presenter instead. I've banned a couple of users in the emc.com domain for entering the virtual lottery using two e-mail addresses each. Their entries were also removed prior to the virtual lottery draw. Added guaranteed jackpot code back into InterLotto page generation and also fixed some problems with the InterLotto results file updating (not writing out the fields correctly during auto-updates).

  The "bhs" software that I use to generate these pages (it's also used throughout the Connect and MerseyWorld pages) has been "misbehaving" over recent weeks (not expanding the macros or setting ownerships of generated HTML correctly, leading to somewhat incomprehensible pages full of macros !), so I tackled it over the weekend. I've added a lot more checks and coded things much more conservatively, which will hopefully avoid future problems (or at least generate warnings when things go wrong !).

  One trivia point for devoted readers to these pages - I have now written 300K of C source code to maintain them ! That's probably more C code than that used for all the other lottery pages on the Internet combined :-)

• Saturday 20th April
  The first mail request was too fast for the draw, so the first update was at 8.36pm instead. A small bug in the fallback code for WWW sites meant that a couple of sites weren't re-scanned every 5 minutes (at least until 8.35pm anyway) like they should have been. An exact jackpot amount appeared on the pages from 9.17pm onwards.

• Friday 19th April
  I installed the latest version of weblint which now thankfully no longer complains about empty table elements (i.e. <TD></TD>), which is perfectly legal HTML of course [and present in my tables]. I removed a somewhat pointless <UL> indent on the Lucky Dip page and also added another "go away" index.html page [have you found those yet ? :-) ] to plug the final gap in the WWW tree.

  All of this meant that "weblint -d heading-order -x netscape,java" is now completely silent for all of my lottery pages, which is probably the first time they've been syntactically "perfect" (OK, I don't agree with weblint complaining about the heading order, so I disabled that one :-) ). I also passed the software and pages through lint, gcc and spell -b, which cleared up a few minor oversights.

• Wednesday 17th April
  Updated the scratchcard sales and the Lucky Dip sales figures.

• Tuesday 16th April
  I made some adjustments to the Notes at the bottom of the various sales pages to avoid redundancy. For example, the Lucky Dip sales Notes don't mention Super Draws any more because there aren't any on that page (but if we do have them in the future, the Notes will switch to mentioning them).

  If the jackpot pool estimate on a Saturday evening is less than £6.5m (all jackpot prizes won by a single ticket - or not won at all - have been greater than this), then the update code now displays "Jackpot prize" instead of "Jackpot pool" because it's likely ITV teletext will have mistakenly put the individual jackpot prize rather than the pool on their sub-pages if the figure is that low (they did this during Saturday 6th April :-( ).

• Monday 15th April
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #74 and fixed the Netscape Commerce Server problem (see Saturday). Found out that, like scratchcard sales, the figures for the Lucky Dip sales aren't available until Wednesday, so I've adjusted the code for the appropriate sales pages to indicate this.

• Sunday 14th April
  The exact jackpot amount was updated at 9.06am. Still frustrated by Saturday's server problem though so no-one was seeing these updates :-( "I need an Internet connection at home," he screamed in a very loud voice.

• Saturday 13th April
  At 12.51am, the Netscape Commerce Server handling port 80 (i.e. normal http) just seemed to hang, refusing requests. The secure port 443 (https) was OK though, but how many people would work out that they could use that ? Very few I bet ! What's so disappointing about this is that the update went well (8.06pm) and the 6 other UK lottery WWW sites (including Might BU, who brag about "real-time updates") didn't have an update by then, so I would have been the first site on the Internet to have the results.

• Friday 12th April
  It's really weird that Camelot's phone line doesn't give out unclaimed prize info on individual draws, but it does keep a record of how many tickets were bought for each draw using the new Lucky Dip facility. I've got the figures for these now and have duly added a new page for them [only needed a bit of tweaking to existing sales page code] and also added them to the appropriate individual lottery pages. In a similar vein, I subtracted the Lucky Dip figures from the ticket sales for a draw to obtain a manual sales figure, which subsequently also got its own page (now that's what I call code re-use !).

• Wednesday 10th April
  The network connection returned at 8.04am (missing for 16 hours :-( ). I was going back through the virtual lottery entry logs and noticed some anon.penet.fi entries which had slipped through the net (I'd disallowed penet.fi, but let through anon.penet.fi :-( ). I've duly tightened the banned users domains and adjusted the rules to explicitly prohibit anonymous e-mail addresses for virtual lottery entries. I'm sorry if people disagree with this, but anonymous e-mail addresses counter my argument about making e-mail addresses of winners public [the spread of e-mail addresses lends credence to the virtual lottery and suggests that it's not being fiddled, whereas anonymous e-mail implies the opposite].

  I've further tweaked the config file for auto-grabbing WWW pages from other lottery sites as a backup if the teletext mail doesn't come though. Basically, some sites are [predictably] changing the format from time-to-time when they update their page just after a draw. This one's definitely a moving target, but I've pinned down all but Might BU now (they seem to change the format of the text line that announces the results from week to week !). Added the latest scratchcard sales info to the lottery results data file and re-generated the appropriate pages.

• Tuesday 9th April
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #73. I was fed up with the crummy old frequency charts, so I extended the lottery ball GIF generating program to also dump GIFs of frequency charts both in ordered and unordered format. This resulted in an infinitely superior set of bar charts with solid bars, horizontal alignment, colour-coding based on the frequency, larger dimensions but actually smaller file sizes for the GIFs (the horizontal alignment probably helped the most to reduce this).

  Added percentage changes to the various ticket sales pages and also added those percentage rises or falls to each individual lottery page. Added an average frequency line in the middle of frequency-sorted tables so that you can see at a glance which numbers are below the average frequency. I've put a sentence in individual rollover pages to indicate that amount that was rolled over into the jackpot prize pool from the previous lottery.

  At 3.52pm, we lost our SuperJANET network link to the outside world - it wasn't a fault with Connect, Computer Science or even the Computing Services Department who supply the link from the University into SuperJANET, but appeared to be a problem with SuperJANET itself.

• Sunday 7th April
  ITV teletext corrected yesterday's "mistake" and reverted to displaying the jackpot prize pool (rather than the individual prize) on their sub-pages. My updates duly corrected this figure at 9.07am.

• Saturday 6th April
  The first update was at 8.07pm (only 3 minutes after the draw) much to my relief because I didn't expect the teletext mail server to be available over the Easter weekend. Maybe it was Easter madness, but ITV teletext page 123 decided to put the individual jackpot prize at the top of their sub-pages. They'd always put the jackpot prize pool at the top previously, so my auto-update code referred to the £4.2m prize as the pool, which was incorrect of course.

• Thursday 4th April
  Completed the addition of machine names to the InterLotto results data file. This means that individual InterLotto lottery pages and the further draw details page now have machine name info (Hansel and Gretel would you believe it ! What about the witch then ? :-) ). I got home this evening only to realise that I'd left the draw day (Friday) announcement code still active for InterLotto's pages...bad news because it would give the impression that there was a draw on Good Friday, when in fact the next draw is on 12th April :-(

• Wednesday 3rd April
  Did the usual round of spell-checking (two minor mistakes fixed), gcc/lint checking (another 2 small fixes), weblinting (removed extraneous /body and /html tags from the access stats page) and internal link checking. You'd be surprised how many WWW sites (99% I bet) don't do any of the above ! Added last week's scratchcard sales figure to the pages.

  I've moved the auto-update info page into the background info directory and changed its headers/footers to blend in with the other pages in that tree. I've done a similar thing with the InterLotto version, though both moves meant plenty of link changes to other pages.

• Tuesday 2nd April
  Bought a third and fourth ticket (the latter for the first time of course) for the rollover draw next Saturday. Fixed minor bug that didn't affect anything really - the auto-update system was trying to create a page for the "next lottery" once it had provisional results of the draw that had just taken place (e.g. last Saturday it tried to create a page for Lottery #73). It doesn't try to do that any more because that only appears when I upload the results during the next working day.

  I've added links to the prize amounts in the top 10 "most prizes won" table on the best performing tickets page, which display a CGI-generated complete history of each ticket. In the course of doing this, I discovered that the InterLotto version had integer-truncated prize amounts, which I duly fixed. There's now an Average column on the individual prizes page, which indicates the average prize for each lottery. As well as saying "1 in X tickets won a prize" on each individual lottery page, I also display the percentage of players that won too (it's 100/X% as you can probably guess).

  I've expanded the second table on each individual lottery page to include a total and average row for the balls, frequencies and last appearances. The table on the individual page for Lottery #1 now no longer has the "draws since last appeared" columns, since this would be "never" throughout. I've also added an "Either" to the "draws since last appeared" columns (indicating last appearance as either a main or bonus number). Finally, I changed the lines of equals in the both individual page tables to be a horizontal rule right across the page instead.

• Monday 1st April
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #72. It's April Fool's Day, perhaps an appropriate time to mark the start of the first full working week in our new Connect accommodation. Yes, I can now phone Camelot from my work desk at long last, rather than having to go 50 yards down the corridor to make a call ! Fixed a bug with the sorting of frequency indices when creating a C integer array as part of a header file. I was using a swap flag when I shouldn't have done, leading to scrambled eggs for the InterLotto frequencies :-(

  Fixed a bug with the link for the previous lottery on the home page - when the draw day announcements appeared inbetween the winning numbers and that previous lottery link, it altered the draw number variable so when I subtracted one to get the previous lottery, the "previous lottery" became the current one on Saturday until the first provisional results came in :-( I now save the first draw number mentioned (the one associated with the displayed winning numbers) and then subtract one from that saved value to get the draw number for the previous lottery link.

  Added a new top 10 "most prizes won" section to the best performing tickets page. This is similar to the page I deleted a few months ago. It appears that weekly scratchcard sales aren't confirmed until Wednesday, so I added extra code to the sales page to display N/A where appropriate and also to calculate total and average sales excluding any week with no scratchcard sales figures.

Previous month: March 1996

© Richard K. Lloyd & Connect Internet Solutions Limited  2024