What's New On These Pages: March 1998

Next month: April 1998

• Saturday 28th March
  Talk about chaos - this was a particularly trying Saturday for the following reasons:
  • Whatever You Want overran by 8 minutes and 20 seconds, cutting down the debut of the National Lottery Big Ticket down to 46 minutes and 40 seconds.
  • The National Lottery Big Ticket show was dismal, there's no other word for it.
  • The lottery show started before the lottery tills had closed ticket sales for that draw (though the draw didn't take place until about 7.55pm).
  • The BBC foolishly split the announcement of the 4 TV Home Play numbers into two sets of two numbers, which made things highly confusing.
  • I haven't automated much yet w.r.t. the TV Home Play numbers, so I was having to type some stuff in manually (not a good thing, because I predictably didn't quite get it right).
  • After the show had ended, Camelot realised that they'd used the wrong ball set to draw the 3rd TV Home Play ball, so they had to re-draw that ball off-camera and honour the two sets of 4 numbers (meaning that there's potentially double the number of TV Home Play jackpot winners !).

  Despite all of this, I still had commentary on the full TV show, the main lottery draw live and also put up the full results before anyone else (Camelot took an age to get the full results though - almost an hour).

  I've now re-coded the ticket checker and the TV Home Play winning numbers page to allow for the corrected sets. It's too tricky to display the corrected set and the original one at the same time in the ticket checker, so I just switch the matching numbers when I spot that the corrected set matches instead of the original set. Oh, I've only allowed for one number to be corrected (like tonight's fiasco) - any more than that and it all comes crashing down :-)

  Added a TV Home Play winning numbers page, just to let people manually inspect the 16 weeks of numbers without having to use the Ticket Checker.

• Wednesday 25th March
  The live TV show commentary and draw update went OK - the Java graphical update on the chat room page was fine (though comments like "6 ... a white ball" don't exactly excite people much !). Put up the full results before anyone else as usual. Launched the new TV Dreams Ticket Checker coding in full now (though you can't actually get checking output until Saturday night of course).

  Merged the new Java classes for the second applet used on the chat room page (graphical ball update) into our standard classes directory. Also talked with the author about some improvements, which we may be able to introduce in time for Saturday's draw.

  I've "stealth-launched" the TV Dreams Ticket Checker coding in the early hours of this morning. It's an option on the Ticket Checker front-end page, but if you select it, it will just say "come back after 9pm tonight to see the launch". I'll make a big song and dance about this world exclusive service after tonight's lottery draw. Received the usual weekly sales fax from Camelot and updated the pages appropriately.

  For the technically curious, the URL encoding of the TV Home Play numbers required one less character (5 vs. 6) than the UK National Lottery numbers, though the first number (range 1-99) is encoded in 2 characters. This theoretically means I could probably allow more than 42 tickets to be checked at once, but it's hardly worth it - with odds of 7.3 to 1 to even just get a set of TV Home Play numbers (not necessarily winning ones), it would cost an average of £613 of TV Dreams scratchcards for someone to exceed the 42 limit...

• Tuesday 24th March
  Continued TV Dreams Ticket Checker coding - it's about 75% complete now and will be launched tomorrow. Of course, there's still page coding for a TV Dreams winning numbers page to do, as well putting the results on each appropriate individual lottery page and the lottery home page, but the Ticket Checker is as much coding as all that put together ! I have a TV Dreams results data file now of course, but nothing planned in terms of live updates or anything.

• Monday 23rd March
  Received a subscription news leaflet - Camelot have finally woken up and allowed 7 sets of numbers to be subscribed and also support Direct Debit payments. Now all they need to do is to allow credit card subscription payments via the Internet from non-UK people and they'll have got it right at last :-) Continued the TV Dreams coding and have now nearly completed single ticket checking.

• Saturday 21st March
  There were plenty of people in the chat room for the TV show commentary and live draw, the latter of which successfully used the new second applet to graphically update the balls live. There's still a few snags with it (particularly the failure to re-read the per-ball comments file as each number is entered via the chat room, plus no way to delete a wrong ball if I make a mistake !), but I was pleased with its debut. I beat everyone else to putting up the full results as usual.

  Took a breather from TV Dreams coding to add a second applet on the chat room during draw evenings to indicate the winning numbers graphically live (it's a bit dull just having me typing in the numbers textually in the chat room, so this displays appropriately coloured balls). The new system also relays a pre-generated TV-show like phrase for each winning number to the chat room, plus I can force a sort of the balls at any time.

  The Live Updates system also modifies the Java PARAM tags on that second ball-displaying applet, so even if someone comes in mid-draw, they will get a (sorted) copy of the balls. All numbers are re-transmitted by the applet at each update, so they will correctly update within 8 seconds of someone coming in during the actual draw (which could mean "unsorting" them if I haven't forced a sort yet).

  Because I'm now dynamically generating the Chat Room HTML code depending on the time of day and day of the week, I took the opportunity to code the message at the top ("Next Lottery Chat Room event:"...), so I never have to edit the page manually again (which I was astonishingly doing until today). Oh, I didn't write either the Chat Room or the ball displaying applets before you ask - they were done by a couple of Java experts at Connect.

• Friday 20th March
  Added JavaScript to the main menu page of the revised Ticket Checker to allow it to jump to the option as soon as it's selected. I used the "jumping menu" code on the Netscape home page to implement it. Received the sales fax from Camelot (a bit later than usual) and duly updated the pages.

• Thursday 19th March
  Started modifying the Ticket Checker system to include the TV Dreams scratchcard TV Home Play numbers (4 numbers each Saturday for 16 weeks from 28th March onwards). You can't see the new code yet because I've only enabled it on my home machine, but I also took the opportunity to convert some of the clumsy radio buttons into selectable menus (which I may add JavaScript to so that when one of the options is chosen, it immediately runs that option without needing to click on the form submission button first [which still has to be there for non-JavaScript browsers]).

• Wednesday 18th March
  The chat room was fairly busy for the live TV show commentary and draw update. I mis-typed the number of 4-match winners (causing my formula check to complain) and it took about 5 minutes for me to spot this, but I still beat ITV and BBC teletext to the full results anyway.

• Saturday 14th March
  It was strangely quiet in the chat room (empty or people coming in and leaving quickly afterwards) until the live draw itself, when 5 or 6 watched it in the chat room. I had the full results up before anyone else of course.

• Friday 13th March
  Fixed a bug with the bonus number draw order offset when two or more people are updating the Live Updates system simultaneously. Because it's always the 7th ball drawn, the draw order offset is now forced to 7 (it was incorrectly coming out as 0 sometimes).

  I've had an interesting "feature" with the newsflashes archive in recent weeks - I had so many newsflashes in the space of 2 months that my purging code to delete newsflashes older than 2 months didn't work because I'd assumed I wouldn't have more than one newsflash per day (so the maximum newsflashes allowed before "problems" deleting them occurred was 61). I've raised that limit to a maximum of 255 newsflashes in a 2 month period, which is unlikely ever to be reached !

• Wednesday 11th March
  The live TV show commentary and update went OK and I beat everyone else to putting up the full results. Belatedly noticed that the official lottery site had put some info up about TV Dreams last Friday (hey, only 3 weeks after they were launched !) and they also have an intermediate latest results page, though the home page remains as static as ever. Received the latest sales figures fax from Camelot as usual and duly updated the pages.

• Saturday 7th March
  The TV show was strangely shifted to 8.05pm, was 25 minutes long (why ??) and even featured Mystic Meg for the first time in months. The live commentary of the TV show went well and I had the full results up way before BBC teletext and ITV teletext (and a full hour ahead of BBC TV themselves, who went into an Eddie Murphy movie straight after the lottery show).

• Wednesday 4th March
  The live TV show commentary and draw update went OK and I displayed the full results before anyone else. Received the usual weekly Camelot fax and duly updated the sales figures.

• Tuesday 3rd March
  Finally received the full TV Dreams Rules booklet from Camelot, so I transcribed the more relevant bits onto a new page.

Previous month: February 1998

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