What's New On These Pages: November 1997

Next month: December 1997

• Sunday 30th November
  This site exceeded 1 million hits in a month for the first time ever.

• Saturday 29th November
  Had a small problem with the auto-refresh on the home page and individual lottery page - it needs some tinkering with again I suspect. At least I could update the home page (unlike last Wednesday !). Apart from that niggle, the commentary, live update and full results were all smooth (and quicker than anyone else).

  Added a "Latest.gif" soft-link to point to the latest result GIF (in addition to the Saturday.gif and Wednesday.gif soft-links I set up recently), so that people who want to link (with some sort of credit to my site please !) to the latest result's GIF can do so.

• Friday 28th November
  Corrected Wednesday-only and Saturday-only future draw ranges (they kept rounding back towards the present !) in the Ticket Checker. Also took the opportunity to display the date of any future draw beyond the next draw if its specified as the start or end draw for a ticket check (I don't have any future draw dates apart from the next draw, so it has to be calculated via complex code).

  I've corrected some of the slightly dubious date/month/year comparisons when you selected a start or end draw to check using those pop-up date menus. At the same, I extended the year pop-up to include next year if 16 draws into the future crossed the year boundary (that's the case at the moment). I've coded support so that - at last - the date/month/year pop-ups can be used to select future draws.

  Corrected the maximum start and end draw range code so that it properly adjusts for Wednesday only or Saturday only ranges. I've improved the footnote at the bottom of the draw range page by also specifying the full date when stating the latest possible allowed future start and end draws.

  Note that you can "check" tickets that are completely in the future even though the page that's returned doesn't have any checking results (the draws haven't taken place yet of course !). The reason for allowing this slightly unusual check is so that the returned page can be bookmarked ready for when the first draw of the check does indeed take place.

• Thursday 27th November
  Received the latest sales figures fax from Camelot and duly added the info to these pages.

• Wednesday 26th November
  Tonight's TV show didn't start until 8.45pm (its latest ever regular slot), so the timing system for auto-refresh and home page updates went AWOL because of the very late start (an hour later than next Saturday's show !). To compensate, I transcribed the numbers into the chat room, so there was still a live update on the pages. I've now corrected the time check for this (it's quite sensitive to shows jumping around the schedules), so it should work next Wednesday.

  When I phoned for the full results, Camelot's phone system was engaged and then said all its lines were busy when I tried again (I blame Alan Dedicoat for jamming the lines - he read out the lottery phone line number just as the draw was about to take place !). I wasn't too happy that, by the time I got through, BBC 1 had already announced the number of jackpot winners and how much they'd won. This was compounded by the woman on the line claiming they hadn't got the full results, so I persuaded her to check and they did have them !

  Despite all this, I still easily beat BBC and ITV teletext to the full results, especially since the latter was still blowing its own trumpet about how it's going to have in-vision winning numbers live (big deal - ITV pop up the numbers anyway !) and "more facts and figures" (er, not in the same league as my pages I suspect :-) ).

  I've extended the Super Draws section to include similar info for rollovers too. I've fixed a bug in the PLUSLotto auto-update (it was stupidly dropping the bonus number if the winning numbers weren't supplied in the update, but other info was).

• Monday 24th November
  Allowed the draw range in the Ticket Checker to encroach into "future draws" for the first time. If you use the numerical text box to enter the start and end draw number, you can now set the start draw to be the next draw and the end draw to be any one of the next 16 draws. The reason for this is to allow people to bookmark their multi-draw (or single-draw) ticket in advance (it wasn't previously possible to do this) and have it completely check it without having to re-bookmark the ticket.

  Prior to the change, people would have to wait until the first draw of the ticket took place and then bookmark that draw as the start draw and the "latest draw" as the end draw. This was unsatisfactory because the bookmark would work OK for the draws, but would carry on extending itself (because of the "latest draw" setting) well after the final draw of the ticket had taken place. It's now possible to bookmark the exact ticket you've bought (which doesn't necessarily have to be a multi-draw ticket of course).

• Saturday 22nd November
  The TV show dragged on for 30 minutes (with unbelievably bad padding), but the commentary and draw went OK. The full results took some 50 minutes to come through though, which was silly because ticket sales weren't as spectacular as the "5 million per hour" figures Camelot quoted today had lead us to believe.

• Friday 21st November
  Bought two extra tickets for tomorrow's Super Draw and this now makes it exactly 50 extra tickets that I've bought for Super Draws to date.

• Wednesday 19th November
  A colleague decided to do some pre-OS upgrade work on the offline server (yes, the one I use to generate lottery Web pages from) between 6.30pm and about 9.15pm tonight. This meant I had to manually edit pages during that period, but that's part of what I do on draw night anyway. I even generated the provisional home page (with the question marks in the balls) at around 8pm because the jackpot pool (£15m) was already known of course and I wanted to get the auto-refresh code on the home page :-)

  There were many people in the chat room when the TV show and draw took place, but it was frustrating not being able to generate the initial stats. Anyway, I phoned Camelot 3 times to get the full results and noted them down correctly, but I transcribed the number of 4-match winners incorrectly into my results data file. I was busy accusing Camelot of a mistake when I suddenly spotted my own error and sheepishly backed out of the phone call :-)

  Fixed a bug in the Super Draws statistics pages - I'd not used the right variable to display the highest Super Draw jackpot prize at the bottom of each table. Received the latest sales figures fax from Camelot and duly updated the Web pages.

• Tuesday 18th November
  Had a day off, so did the usual round of gcc'ing, linting, weblinting, spell checking and link checking on the pages. Added a couple of GIF soft-links (re-generated after each draw) to allow selected external sites to pick up the winning numbers for Wednesday and Saturday draws with a constant URL, rather than having to change the link each time.

  For the curious, the first site to use these links (with my permission) is UK Online (although when I last checked this, they'd got the widths wrong so the GIFs look a bit screwy - I've e-mailed them asking them to correct this). Note that anyone else linking in this manner must obtain permission from me first and I expect my main URL of http://lottery.merseyworld.com/ to be linked to on the same page as well (to ID that the GIFs come from my site).

  Nice to see that when ITV teletext page 123 goes its own way and tries to create its own lottery news, it continues to get it hopelessly wrong. Today it claimed that if tomorrow's £15m Super Draw jackpot wasn't won, then Saturday's jackpot pool would be a guaranteed £40m (they'd done the dumb thing and just added the two Super Draw figures of £15m and £25m together !).

  In fact, Camelot have confirmed that Saturday's draw would be a "normal" rollover draw if Wednesday's jackpot isn't won (i.e. no guaranteed jackpot), but since £15m would be rolling over, the jackpot for Saturday may indeed reach or exceed £25m, but definitely won't be either guaranteed or reach anywhere near £40m...

• Monday 17th November
  A user reported that the typing/pasting method of adding tickets to the ticket check was ignoring the last ticket if it wasn't terminated by a carriage return. I'd worried about this originally, but put the wrong check in for this condition ! I've now corrected the bug.

  Another user reported a problem with the number of header columns in the Prize Winners CGI when the number of winners page is sorted in any method other than date order. This was because I'd not allowed for the additional "No." column indicating the position - this has been fixed now. Bought another two tickets for Wednesday's Super Draw.

• Saturday 15th November
  The live commentary and update was fine, but yet again Camelot took an age to get the full results though (I got them at about 9.07pm, after BBC 1 had told people the number of jackpot winners !), but I still beat everyone else to putting them up, which was somewhat surprising.

  Fixed a problem spotted tonight with the generated Super Draw pages during the "twilight zone" (i.e. post-draw, but pre-full results). I was listing Super Draws for which I didn't have the full results yet - I've now fixed this anomaly. Completed the other two program-generated statistics pages for the Super Draws section - one in jackpot top-ups order and the other in ticket sales order.

  Added a long overdue Super Draws section that includes a FAQ and a stats page, although I only had time to do the date-ordered version initially. It's the only place to find out the "top-ups" applied to each Super Draw, as well as Super Draw highs, lows, averages and totals of course. I keep thinking that it should be part of one of the CGI sections, but it doesn't fit comfortably in any of them really.

• Friday 14th November
  Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's Super Draw.

• Thursday 13th November
  Received the usual weekly fax from Camelot and added last week's sales figures to the pages.

• Wednesday 12th November
  The live commentary and update went fairly smoothly, but when I came to re-generate the full results, my work machine was hellishly slow. I kicked off a user that shouldn't have been on there (it was post-9pm after all) and that didn't make any difference, so I can only assume that it was network/NFS problems. It delayed the generation of the pages by several minutes, but I think I was still quickest on the Net (I was too busy fuming about the ludicrously slow speed everything was running at).

  Decide to take a day off and all hell broke loose. Firstly, Carol Smillie has her second baby (a son), next Camelot and the BBC are to drop the word "Live" from the lottery TV show (presumably meaning more pre-recorded segments - maybe even the musical artist will be pre-recorded ?), next the Saturday show will be more based around the guest celebrity and then finally the Wednesday show will shift to 8.45pm GMT from 3rd December onwards.

• Monday 10th November
  Got home and upgraded my home UNIX workstation from 64MB to 128MB RAM. It was a bit tricky to insert the SIMMs, but I sussed the technique eventually after a couple of goes. This means I now have enough RAM to run (the cut-down) Netscape 4.03 both at home and work (I like to run the same browser at both locations, so I was stuck at 3.03 until this RAM upgrade).

  Mind you, I got annoyed enough at 4.03's inability to close the document source or info windows (ALT-W worked with 3.03, but it doesn't with 4.03), that I've gone back to 3.03 during page development (I look at the source code to pages a lot when coding - it's the easiest way to "debug" CGIs).

  Someone rightly spotted that the Lucky Dip section of the Ticket Checker wasn't picking "RKL Random Numbers" when that option was selected. It was a simple fix to correct the problem (I'd passed zero to the function involved all the time, rather than zero = truly random and one = RKL random numbers). Popped into Tesco tonight and picked up a couple more tickets for Wednesday's rollover draw.

• Saturday 8th November
  The live commentary, update and full results all went fine today (quickest with all of them as usual), but the big shocker tonight was that Red Kite New Media have replaced the dreadful Nethead w.r.t. designing the official UK lottery Web site and the new site's surprisingly good. It's not got the level of numerical info my site's got (I honestly don't think any other UK lottery site ever will), but the presentation is impressive and you can finally get a set of all previous winning numbers, which was outrageously missing in Nethead's original site.

  Continued the coding started yesterday and added comma-separated values versions of the Prize Winners pages, which means that all the figures I now keep are available for importing into spreadsheets or lottery databases. Probably cutting my own throat (makes it easier for someone else to set up a rival lottery site for example !), but people have been occasionally requesting CSV pages so I've completed the task at last.

• Friday 7th November
  A long session of coding finally resulted in HTML table versions of the Prize Winners pages and also uncovered some bugs including incorrect averages for the prizes/winners/pools when all the lotteries aren't selected (i.e. I was mistakenly dividing by the total number of lotteries to date, rather than by just the number of lotteries actually displayed). Also improved behaviour when no lotteries are selected at all (e.g. pre-1997 Wednesday draws).

• Thursday 6th November
  Lily Savage was going to announce the forthcoming third anniversary Super Draws tomorrow, but "she" was taken ill and Camelot released the info today, much to the surprise of the staff at Camelot's phone line when I rang them to confirm the info that first appeared on the Press Association Web site. Finally got it straightened out and discovered that all three Super Draws celebrate the third anniversary in dubiously different ways.

  Received the usual weekly sales figures fax from Camelot and duly updated the Web pages. Spotted that the HTML tables in the Sales Figures section were mis-aligning in PC Netscape 4.X, so I added  's in various places and that seems to have done the trick.

  Somewhat unusually, I actually got a letter today from someone who seems to have got both confused and excited that the 6 numbers that they typed (or Lucky Dip-picked) in the Ticket Checker system had won a jackpot - they seemed to think that checking your numbers entered you into the UK lottery ! Anyway, a quick check of www.four11.com found his likely e-mail address (nope, it wasn't in the letter), so I sent him an e-mail clarifying his confusion.

• Wednesday 5th November
  A smooth commentary and live update tonight, although it took ages to get the full results (6 phone calls through to 9.30pm before I got the info I wanted). Luckily, BBC teletext had only put up the jackpot information (bizarrely omitting any other tiers initially) and ITV teletext had put the same in its News Headlines section (duh - should have been on its lottery page first surely ?). Hence, I was indeed the first to make the full results available.

• Tuesday 4th November
  The OS upgrade that we scheduled for this morning didn't work (for the third time :-( ), so we'll have to try again some time in the future. I've hopefully now removed the last references in the C code to the old-style ticket checking CGI code (I'd left links in the returned page from a virtual lottery entry and on the Best Performing Tickets page that called the old ticket checking code). Added a comma-separated values version of the Sales Figures output (stripped down to just the reverse date order version).

• Saturday 1st November
  I've obsoleted the old-style ticket checking (the stuff that was last available back in June and which used the cumbersome 24 * 6 grid), so all users now have to use the new Ticket Checker, whether they like it or not (up until this evening, the old CGI code was still there, but has been displaying a warning for that past few weeks that it would be obsoleted today).

  Whilst the live commentary and update were fine, the full results took an eternity to get from the Camelot line. It took 7 phone calls and someone on the line to finally get off their backside and check if they were available (they were 20 minutes late releasing the figures) for me to get the full results, by which time ITV and BBC teletext had put them up anyway...grrr...

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