What's New On These Pages: October 1996

Next month: November 1996

• Wednesday 30th October
  Added a Live Updates FAQ.

• Tuesday 29th October
  I only had time for a quick test yesterday on the Connect server of the Live Updates system and it had several problems, all of which I fixed except one, which had to wait until this morning (the Live Updates version of the lottery home page needed extra files on the Connect server that weren't there - without them, a half-completed set of home page links were displayed).

  There are now two separate time stamps (one for the seven winning numbers and the other for the jackpot prize pool) during a live updates submission. Not only are they treated separately, but neither is updated if the submission isn't a change on the previous one (prior to today, there was only one submission timestamp and it always was set to the last submission, regardless).

  There are two stages to the jackpot pool submission of course - one prior to 9.00pm where only an estimate is known ("estimate" = a figure a exactly divisible by £10,000) and the one after 9.00pm when Camelot releases the exact figure. Note that if the jackpot pool amount submitted is <£100, then it is now multiplied by 1 million on the assumption that the user meant to supply the trailing zeroes, but didn't.

  The code now rounds any non-estimate jackpot amount prior to 9.00pm down to the nearest £10,000. However, any non-estimate jackpot figures accepted after that time will now override estimate jackpots (providing that at least 3 identical non-estimates have been received of course). Number submissions prior to 8.00pm are now prohibited (the submitted numbers are zeroed) because the draw normally takes place after that time.

  Live Update tasks remaining for the weekend:

  • Adding an override system for when I get a home Internet connection.
  • I'm worried about the 8.04pm Saturday page update - it may clash with the Live Updates version of the home page...needs testing/resolving.
  • Probably need to separate out the "Overall Status" part of the returned page from a submission into a CGI link instead (which can then be put in the index page of the Live Updates section as well) - the returned status page is way too long I reckon.
  • Stats about how many times each number has been submitted (with the earliest timestamp for each number) if it appears in the overall status. Timestamp figure for the earliest submission of the jackpot prize pool is also needed.
  • List of Top 10 submitters that have contributed towards this week's overall winning numbers or jackpot prize pool (sorted in most numbers submitted order for the winning numbers and then breaking ties with the earliest timestamp).
  • Hall Of Fame for each week's (or day's during the testing period) earliest person to submit the full set of winning numbers or jackpot prize pool.
  • A Frequently Asked Questions page about the Live Updates system. May also need an Instructions page, though with a few more extra prompts and Notes, that should hopefully be unnecessary.

  Fixed a long-standing time zone straddle bug w.r.t. the midnight, 7.30pm and 8.04pm fixed updates on a Saturday. I wasn't using the current time to extract the time zone - instead, I was using the date of the previous Saturday's lottery for some unknown reason. This now means that next Saturday's fixed updates will correctly state "GMT" after the time, rather than the "BST" they would have done if I hadn't caught this bug.

• Monday 28th October
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #102. Yes, I finally set up the directory for the live updates log files, so it should work OK from 7.30pm tonight onwards (fingers crossed). Note that the teletext/WWW updates will not overwrite or reset the test versions of the updated pages (index_live.html and LottLive.html), because it's useful to have those hanging around to see what happened overnight.

  I've now frozen the coding for the Live Updates system until next weekend - the only changes until then will be to fix bugs (or bad features) reported by users. Next weekend's coding will add a mechanism to allow me to override the live updates when I get an home Internet connection - I've left it on the back-burner because I won't start using it for over a month of course.

  I do know of a few remaining loopholes with the live updates system, but I'm not explaining them here :-) BTW, I suspect that - like my automatic results update - the Live Updates system is probably unique on the Internet. There's so much coding involved to get it working smoothly that I suspect no-one else will implement it in the future...

  Made some adjustments to correct column mis-alignments due to a bonus number that hasn't appeared for 100 draws and over £1 billion in jackpots that has now been won in total.

• Sunday 27th October
  For some inexplicable reason, the teletext system was switched back on at 1.15am and the exact jackpot amount magically appeared on my pages thanks to that...

• Saturday 26th October
  The teletext system was switched off during Saturday, so the fallback WWW results were used from Syndication UK and Chris Prickett's site at 8.10pm. Ironically, no-one had the results at 8.05pm, indicating that there is indeed a need for a Live Updates system...

  Set about the live updates code with real gusto, managing to progress to the point now where people can see two pages update live, albeit not on top of the "normal" equivalent of those pages during this test period. These are index_live.html (the live updates version of the home page) and LottLive.html (live updates version of the live draw's individual lottery page). Obviously, when the system is launched on the 16th November, these two files will overwrite the "real" versions during the live updates.

  The new features/fixes added included:

  • The CGI rejects requests if either before 7.30pm or after midnight, so don't try to copy the submission form and use it after midnight for example :-)
  • The system will now prevent live updates if there's teletext e-mail or WWW page grabs that changed the pages (because they take priority over the live updates).
  • The two new pages generated now correctly use cached GIFs matching their current live updates status (you couldn't see this bug on Friday thanks to me not leaving the system usable, but it was annoying !).
  • There's locking now when writing to the live update log files to avoid potential clashes.
  • The correct person is now credited when the two pages are updated (based on most numbers submitted and breaking a tie with the quickest timestamp). Previously, it would have been the person who sparked off the page generation who was credited (often the "right" person to credit, but sometimes not).
  • The winning numbers and jackpot pool amount quickest submitters are now separately credited (unless both were fully submitted first by the same person, in which case there's only one credit).

• Friday 25th October
  I got home and realised I'd forgotten to create the directory to store the live updates entry log, so the system blocked everyone from trying it out over the weekend. Although this was annoying and a little embarrassing, it was probably a good thing, considering the half-baked state the live updates system was left in on Friday morning.

  Received the latest fax from Camelot and duly updated the mid-week sales figures. Yesterday's CD selection ("music to auto-repeat whilst coding") included:

  • Alisha's Attic Alisa Rules The World CD singles #1 and #2
  • Edward Ball The Mill Hill Self Hate Club CD single
  • Dire Straits Live At The BBC CD album
  • Bob Geldof/The Boomtown Rats Loudmouth - The Best Of CD album
  • Manic Street Preachers Everything Must Go CD single #2
  • The Rembrandts This House Is Not A Home CD single
  • Vaya Con Dios Roots And Wings CD album
  • Sophie Zelmani You And Him CD single
  I tend to pick the title tracks of CD singles and auto-repeat them, unless the other tracks are very good. Yep, I've been known to play the same track for about 4 or 5 hours straight with no problem (has to be up-tempo though), though this can only be done whilst concentrating on coding and leaving the music as a backing tune to hum to occasionally !

• Thursday 24th October
  Took a day off, which enabled me to make real progress with the Live Updates section. The second CGI-generated form will now log each user's submission and the current policy is to treat each and every IP/e-mail address key pair as a separate log entry, although I may have to adapt this policy if it gets abused by people fooling around.

  When numbers are submitted by a user, the CGI now does the following:

  • Adjusts or adds the numbers to the live updates entry log.
  • Generates a live updates version of the home page if necessary, available via a temporary URL. During this test period, this is not linked to from anywhere except from this page and the page returned by the CGI after the numbers are submitted. Obviously, when the system goes live on 16th November, it will directly replace the current lottery home page, so normal visitors will see it too.
  • Create graphics both for the user numbers and the new version of the home page if needed.

  Adjusted the live updates activation cron job at 7.30pm each evening to be part of the draw closure cron job on Saturdays and a standalone cron job for the rest of the week. This stops the two cron jobs clashing on Saturday (one would lock the other out thanks to my lock files for just this eventuality). The cron job now does the following:

  • Zeroes the live updates entry log file (both the offline and online copies of it).
  • Activates the registration form.
  • Resets the live updates version of the lottery home page (i.e. just soft-links it to the normal version !).

  Coding was going well on Thursday evening and I was just getting to some crucial sections when two sets of visitors arrived in quick succession, losing me 3 hours of coding time :-( This basically unravelled my train of thought and forced me not only to abandon coding for the day, but also to hurriedly try to back out of some of the half-finished coding I was doing. I've ended up having to put a few apologetic notes in here and there about the incompleteness of the coding to date because of the major interruption.

• Wednesday 23rd October
  Opened up a new Live Updates section, but there's nothing exciting there yet really. I've installed cron jobs to generate the form at 7.30pm and to remove it at midnight each evening (eventually, the form will only be available on Saturday evenings...and, er, Wednesday evenings now that the midweek draw has been approved). The form's just a placebo at the moment - it does absolutely zero with the submission except check the e-mail address is syntactically reasonable and then displays the form input back to the user.

  I now only recursively change permissions and ownerships of the entire lottery WWW tree when restoring from a SyQuest. Prior to today, any command I typed in to re-generate pages would "fix" the perms/owner of the whole tree, which was ridiculously wasteful (and slow via NFS), especially since any page generated has its permissions and owner individually correctly set anyway.

  This long overdue change should double the speed of next Saturday's fixed updates (midnight, 7.30pm and 8.04pm) yet again - last Saturday's fixed updates took 84 seconds, 31 seconds and 40 seconds respectively (the time variation was probably because other cron jobs were running). I would hope that all fixed updates would be under 30 seconds next Saturday. Even more importantly, the auto-updates should speed up significantly too - they are currently hovering at around 50-55 seconds each.

  Before you wonder what the use of a 50-55 seconds auto-update is when I come to implement the live updates system, well, that system will update the live server pages directly via a CGI, rather than using an off-line machine and mirroring the pages across, which is how the current auto-update system does it (to avoid overloading the live server).

• Tuesday 22nd October
  Bought a couple of extra tickets for next Saturday's rollover - there's now two newsagents on the Liverpool University campus that sell lottery tickets in case you're curious. I didn't buy from either though - I got the tickets from W H Smith in the city centre. Temporarily moved the live updates proposal to a new section, which I'll open up tomorrow (I've got a prototype form I'm preparing that at least needs to do something sensible before I make it public).

  Fixed the text input box in the multiple ticket checker so that its width is based on log₁₀(number of lotteries), although I didn't use that maths function otherwise I'd have to link with the maths library, which I'd avoided so far (and still have of course). I'd done this for the Have You Won ? page, but had neglected to do the same for the ticket checker.

• Monday 21st October
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #101. Added three new categories to the Lottery Links section, which just helped split up some of the existing ones. The official site seems to have failed to update its winning numbers and it's two days after the draw.

• Saturday 19th October
  The first teletext e-mail update returned at 8.04pm, but only with 4 of the 7 numbers, so it was ignored. Syndication UK came through with the winning numbers at 8.05pm and Chris Prickett's came through at 8.15pm, which meant my pages updated at 8.16pm.

  ITV teletext came through at 8.35pm with an estimated jackpot of £9.8m, but when the pool forecast came through (rollover draw), I only parsed it as "20" instead of "20m" because ITV teletext stupidly repeated that there was an "estimated £20m jackpot" in the main part of their pages as well as the top of each sub-page and yep, it threw my page parsing because there was a monetary value in there. I've adjusted the coding so that it should avoid this problem in the future.

  Work commenced on the live update system today, but don't expect even a prototype to be available until at least the end of the month. Once completed, it has the potential to be the only live UK lottery update on the Internet, providing 3 people actually make the effort to enter the results as the draw takes place (fat chance). I suspect that it won't be until I get my home Internet connection that we'll see the truly live updates, since people will probably say "I came to your pages to get the winning numbers and not to supply them"...

• Friday 18th October
  Adjusted the "180 days expiry" page updating code that runs at 11pm on Thursdays so that it generates the pages from 24, 25 and 26 weeks ago to cover the unclaimed prizes note near of the bottom of the individual pages. Previously, I'd only been doing the 25 weeks ago page, which often skipped the update because the unclaimed prizes info wasn't available until the following week.

  Proof-read many pages and tidied up bits'n'pieces. Received the usual weekly fax from Camelot and updated the mid-week figures. Did a major trawl for new lottery sites and managed to exceed 300 sites in the lottery links section at long last.

• Thursday 17th October
  In case you're curious, yes, I'm tracking the Swiss Franc exchange rate on a roughly weekly basis using BBC 2 teletext page 251 (the page generation code converts SFr into sterling and puts the conversion in brackets) and the pound's just broken through the 2 SFr barrier for the first time since I've been tracking it !

• Wednesday 16th October
  Fixed problems with links in yesterday's live update proposal and moved it into the Background Information section.

• Tuesday 15th October
  A proposal for a new live update system was drafted.

• Monday 14th October
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #100 - this now includes 122 pages auto-generated on my work system, plus one more (the best performing tickets page) auto-generated on my home system because it takes so long. I finally managed to hack the GIF of my latest cheque and put it on the usual page.

  I've been re-generating far too many pages that don't change during the weekend auto-updates for many, many months now, so I finally decided to restrict the page updating to only pages that change and this should result in a doubling of the speed the updates take to appear on the live server.

  A good example is when a teletext or WWW result comes through and the pages need updating. Last Saturday, I re-generated 50 pages when this happened. Next Saturday, it will only re-generate 21 pages. The midnight, 7.30pm and 8.04pm fixed updates were even more excessive (64 pages each last Saturday) and will be trimmed to a mere 5 pages each next Saturday.

• Saturday 12th October
  The first teletext e-mail update came through perfectly at 8.06pm and therefore I didn't use any other WWW sites for the results. The exact jackpot amount came through at 9.14pm.

• Friday 11th October
  Received the weekly fax and my £10 cheque from last Saturday's win. I've managed to update the weekly stats, but haven't had time to hack the cheque GIF (it's been scanned in), thanks to 6 and a half hours of Connect meetings I had today...the GIF will have to wait until Monday morning I'm afraid.

• Thursday 10th October
  I decided that the use of <H1 ALIGN=center> as the tag for my headings in all documents was resulting in headings that wrapped onto 2 lines on a PC. Hence, I reduced all headings to H2 and any sub-headings to H3 (they were previously H2). Ironically, UNIX Netscape displays H1, H2 and H3 using exactly the same size font, which explains why I hadn't noticed the problem before.

  Unfortunately, I'd hacked the heading code generation for the virtual lottery entry form incorrectly whilst attempting to scale it down to an <H3> heading, resulting in very weird section numbers on the form until I fortunately spotted this just before I went home and fixed it...

• Wednesday 9th October
  Fixed a bug reported to me via e-mail with the 1994 and 1995 Unclaimed Prizes pages - they had the "Prizes expire 180 days..." sentence in the Notes section which shouldn't have been there (because all lotteries of those two years have expired). Only the latest year pages (for 1996) and the All pages should have had this sentence, so I duly adjusted the code for this.

• Tuesday 8th October
  There was a case study of the IT involved in the UK lottery in Computer Weekly (26th September issue), so I transcribed some of the facts'n'figures into an extra question in the lottery FAQ.

• Monday 7th October
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #99. I had my 8th £10 win on Saturday ! Adjusted any analysis pages that had the lottery number in a column so that they were correctly right-justified to 3 chars. This prepares the pages for the 100th draw so that the columns don't mis-align...

• Sunday 6th October
  It's a good job I ask for teletext pages on Sundays, because the first request today (9.05am) got back the exact jackpot from ITV teletext at long last.

• Saturday 5th October
  Syndication UK updated at 8.05pm (they seem to be the fastest in recent weeks), whilst the first e-mail request was a little slow to return (8.09pm). This was no bad thing because it meant that the returned mail had all the numbers and my pages updated at 8.10pm with a £9.7m estimated jackpot. For some strange reason, ITV teletext failed to update their jackpot figure during the rest of the evening though.

• Friday 4th October
  A new Sales Figures section was launched, re-using much of the layout code previously utilised exclusively for the winning numbers section. There's a whopping 51 pages in the new section (44 of which are brand new, the remaining 7 having been located uneasily in the Numerical Analysis section up until then) and this means that there's now over 700 lottery pages available !

  Every time I do some major hacks, I'll now list the CD albums I listened to whilst coding. Here's the batch for the last couple of days:

  • Altered Images Reflected Images - The Best Of
  • Bangles/Susanna Hoffs Definitive Collection (Dutch double CD)
  • Sam Brown 43 Minutes
  • Amanda Marshall Amanda Marshall
  • Aimee Mann I'm With Stupid
  • Heather Nova Oyster
  • Patti Rothberg Between The 1 And The 9
  • Rebecka Tornquist Good Thing
  As you can see, my music philosophy is if it doesn't have a good, strong female vocalist (er, OK, Clare Grogan isn't much cop really), it ain't worth listening to and it won't surprise you to learn that this means I really don't like Blur or Oasis (neither of which has decent singers or any females for that matter) !

  Received the weekly Camelot fax and duly entered the data into the new Sales Figures section. Noticed that InterLotto had redesigned their pages yet again, so I had to do a rapid hack to switch to their new style, which I managed after much gnashing of teeth. It now uses HTML tables on every page, but lynx 2.6 deals with them quite well, so I'm happy about it.

  My pages were reviewed in the November 1996 issue of Net User magazine, but they a) said there wasn't an official lottery site (wrong - it's been available since July 1996), b) did screen shots of the newsflash (including an 18th August newsflash - a full month after the official site was launched...) and ticket checker pages [hardly two pages that visually stand out] and c) gave it only 4 out of 5 after a glowing review !

• Thursday 3rd October
  Day 2 of the hacks and I set to work on the HTML tables, which turned out to be the widest tables I've constructed to date. This unfortunately means that if you narrow your browser window significantly below 640 pixels, the tables gradually degrade and nothing lines up :-( I've now put a note at the bottom of all winning number and sales figures table pages to indicate that a minimum width is required. I'd got the table pages into good shape by mid-afternoon, so there was only some shifting around left to do.

  One such shift was the "Where The Money Should Go" pre-formatted section, which was previously buried only on the ticket sales page. It's now been moved the bottom of the Sales Figures index page, which is a much higher profile position. I added an extra column to the index page to indicate the grand total figure of each of the categories (ticket sales, scratchcard sales etc.). All coding was completed at 4.19pm in case you're curious (no, I didn't think you were).

  After such an upheaval, I went through the usual site checks (re-compile with gcc [found the -traditional-cpp qualifier that handles bhs macros like the K&R cpp does !], lint, weblint, internal link checking and spell checking) and there were only a few minor changes needed, so everything's in a pretty good state again.

  All of these code hacks encouraged me to write many more functions which work for both the winning numbers and sales figures pages (previously the code was simply inlined into the winning numbers section) and should hopefully be further re-usable when I come to convert other pages to HTML tables.

• Wednesday 2nd October
  The first day off was initially spent cleaning up the existing setup ready for the coding. I spotted an incorrect link returned from the Number Palace CGI code since the top-level winning numbers pages were moved into the "All" subdir, which was duly fixed. I inspected all the lottery binaries and managed to re-arrange the source code to ensure that the CGI and page generation binaries didn't have some of each other's code (which wouldn't be called of course). Prior to the onset of coding, the CGI binary was 88K, whereas the page generation binary was 144K (InterLotto sizes were 56K and 96K respectively).

  Coded the pre-formatted text part of the sales figures section in the evening. The index page has unlinked years for the scratchcards (1994) and Lucky Dip (1994 and 1995) because there's no figures for those years of course. Added year navigation to the top of each yearly pre-formatted page in the same manner as I did with the winning numbers pre-formatted pages. It wasn't until nearly midnight before I was happy with the pre-formatted version...but that's the easier of the two types to code - the HTML table version is going to be "fun".

• Tuesday 1st October
  Continued the preparation for the next 2 days of code hacking by moving the seven sales pages (at the bottom of the Numerical Analysis index page) to the "All" sub-directory. Yet again, I had to run internal link checking, plus a major search-and-replace, to change links for those pages from the Analysis dir to the All dir. I also weblinted the pages, which found a few link errors due to faulty macro expansion on the virtual lottery FAQ page, which have now been fixed.

Previous month: September 1996

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