What's New On These Pages: November 2003

Next month: December 2003

• Friday 28th November
  Fixed a long-standing bug with the Thunderball multi-ticket/multi-draw check - the page returned from that check has a link for each draw in the "Match" column, but that link was using a character in the URL that made the code think it was the main draw, rather than the Thunderball.

• Thursday 27th November
  Bought two more tickets for Saturday's rollover.

• Friday 21st November
  The full results were in by 8.26pm tonight, so I had a look at the Daily Play draw video when it appeared after 10.00pm on the official site and, sure enough, the draw now takes place at 8.05pm (not the original 8.30pm) ! I've moved my results-grabbing cron job even further forward to 8.00pm now. Bought two additional tickets for tomorrow's rollover draw.

• Monday 17th November
  Bizarrely, the Daily Play numbers came through on the official site exactly on the stroke of 8.30pm tonight, with the full results following a mere 8 minutes later. Considering it takes them over an hour on Saturday's just to put up the Daily Play winning numbers, it makes me suspect that they did the Daily Play draw earlier than normal tonight. I've moved my auto-grabbing cron jobs forward to start at 8.15pm instead of 8.30pm just in case it happens again in the future.

• Saturday 15th November
  Added two new pages which I've been meaning to add for years - a table indicating which are the most popular winning numbers picked by the public in the last year (104 draws) and since the main lottery began. It's a load of hokum really because Camelot don't release the figures, but it lets me have some fun with kitchen-sink mathematics if nothing else.

• Wednesday 12th November
  Changed the Live Updates machines for the main draw to be just Amethyst, Moonstone and Opal from now on.

• Friday 7th November
  An alert visitor correctly spotted that I'd messed up the ball colour scheme slightly for the Daily Play game - it's actually 1-9 for white, 10-18 for blue and 19-27 for pink, but I'd got it wrong with 1-9 for white, 10-19 for blue and 20-27 for pink. An adjustment of the algorithm and a regeneration of all the Daily Play balls fixed the problem. Also created the Daily Play ball cache directory (explains why the recent Daily Play additions hadn't been generating ball images !).

• Sunday 2nd November
  Well, after a lot of tweaking, the Lucky Dip, Have You Won ? and Ticket Checker code has been completed for the Daily Play game. I found a few minor bugs along the way from the same code when used for other games (e.g. Have You Won ? for Thunderball didn't calculate the right number of weeks because Thunderball draws are now twice a week of course [it was still scaling by one draw per week instead of two]).

  One unique feature I'm pleased about with the new code is the ability to check Daily Play draws for a particular day of the week (Monday to Saturday) in addition to checking all draws - I don't think any other Daily Play online ticket checker has that. Oh, if you read yesterday's entry, I did fix all the issues listed there.

  I also took the opportunity to tweak the RKL random numbers ticket generation code to make sure that it doesn't loop indefinitely (it will try 1,000 times to generate a ticket that conforms, but if it doesn't, it will use the last non-conforming ticket it generated).

  As a final bonus today, I've added a Daily Play Best Performing Tickets page into the Numerical Analysis section. This currently only takes about 15 seconds to generate, but has been hooked into the automatic Daily Play results grabbing as well (when the full results including the prize amounts and winners are known, the Daily Play BPT page will be re-generated without my intervention).

  To amuse myself, I decided to compare my Daily Play Ticket Checker with the official site's version (you'll need to click on the DAILY PLAY red tab to get to the official Daily Play checker). Let's have a table of features:

  Feature	My checker	Official checker
  Multiple tickets?	Yes, up to 42	No, one at a time
  Oldest draw check?	Draw 1 (22nd Sep 2003)	Only 4 weeks back (Early Oct 2003)
  Check less than 7 numbers per ticket?	Yes, between 1 and 7	No, must be 7 numbers
  Indicates how much won?	Yes, both per draw and overall	No, only shows number of matches
  Shows number of Lucky Dips "won"?	Yes, both per draw and overall	No

  I think it speaks for itself - the official Daily Play ticket checker is pretty awful :-( Sadly, it's a similar story for the official ticket checkers for other games too...

• Saturday 1st November
  I wasn't going to mention it until it was ready, but, yes, I've been working on Daily Play ticket checking over the last few days. I'm about half way through the code at the moment, though you might actually be able to sneak into the work-in-progress pages via a couple of routes I'm not revealing here and if you do, I know about these problems I'm working on:
  • I've still got to add in an "LD" column (number of Lucky Dip tickets won for not matching any numbers on one or more Daily Play tickets).

  • The "Latest" Daily Play draw isn't necessarily today's if you've chosen to check against a particular day of the week's draw (yes, you will be able to do that, unlike any other Daily Play checker out there !).

  • Single ticket checking code hasn't been adjusted to cope with Daily Play yet, so they have the wrong number of columns - the multilple ticket checking pages are OK though.

  • I've not even looked at the Lucky Dip page for Daily Play at all, so I don't even know how bad a state that is at the moment. :-)

  I'll be working on the above over the next few days and hope to have something ready to launch by next Wednesday.

Previous month: October 2003

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