What's New On These Pages: October 1995

Next month: November 1995

• Monday 29th October
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #50. No-one won the first virtual lottery that had a prize, so it rolls over to £100 for the next draw. Adjusted most of the external InterLotto links to point to a more open site, so that UK and Swiss users can at least get through to a site with some info.

• Saturday 28th October
  Shifting the first mailout by one minute to 8.02pm was successful - the pages were updated at 8.14pm, a mere 10 minutes after the draw. I will leave it at this time for the next month or so to make sure that it's reliable and doesn't beat the ITV page 123 teletext page update. When I'm happy with that, I'll try for 8.01pm (though that really does have a high risk of missing the update). Note that ITV teletext got the jackpot pool completely wrong for the whole of Saturday evening (they put up the individual jackpot prize instead) and didn't fix it until the next day.

• Friday 27th October
  I wanted to more prominently advertise the virtual lottery on the home page and InterLotto wanted their logo somewhere there too, so I've duly made it more "obvious".

• Wednesday 25th October
  "Trimmed" the UK 7-ball and InterLotto 6-ball GIFs so that they no longer have any extraneous transparent border. This tightens the text next to the 7-ball GIF on the UK home page (doesn't make much difference on the InterLotto home page).

• Tuesday 24th October
  Added the first lottery handout page. Discovered that the InterLotto site has now had to ban UK players because of stringent UK gaming laws :-( Substantially updated the Lottery Links section. Found out that Netscape's Commerce Server was not killing off my "say" speech CGI program when people were clicking on "Stop" to abort it. Hopefully fixed it by trapping (and quitting on) various signals, including SIGPIPE, SIGINT and SIGHUP. Note that we never had this problem with the NCSA server...

• Monday 23rd October
  OK, so now you find out why I really have recently been sluggish updating the lottery pages ! An R&D/sponsorship contract has been signed with InterLotto which has 2 functions. Firstly, a small InterLotto advert is present near the top of most of the virtual lottery pages. In return, InterLotto will sponsor the virtual lottery prize to the tune of £50 per draw. This is a big relief, because I didn't really see the point of continuing much longer without a real prize for each draw.

  Secondly, a statistics area for InterLotto has been produced, which is basically a reworking of the UK National Lottery code (not quite as easy as it sounds because InterLotto is a 6 from 40 lottery with no bonus ball). InterLotto pays Connect to maintain the InterLotto statistics area in case you're wondering, although the updates are provided directly by InterLotto via a complex mail filter.

  Oh, uploaded the results for Lottery #49 of course. I've also adjusted the first Saturday teletext mail to be 8.02pm instead of 8.03pm and added a fallback 9.02pm mail-out in case the 8.02pm misses the update. This is because the return e-mail is arriving at around 8.25pm and I'd like it a bit earlier than that if possible. Changed algorithm for the virtual lottery claim security code, which should make it a lot harder to crack (I hope). I don't think anyone cracked the old algorithm, but this new one has an extra layer that's even more difficult to suss.

• Sunday 22nd October
  HP (and I suspect many other UNIX vendors) had an incorrect timezone setting for the UK, as did 75% of UK diaries, who all thought it was next Sunday when BST switched back to GMT ! Needless to say, some of the automatic pages said BST with today's date, rather than GMT. A judicious hack on Monday fixed the timezone file and everything's groovy again.

• Tuesday 17th October
  The Mersey World launch went well - Liverpool Town Hall was packed out (more than 200 people there). Of course, the lottery pages aren't actually part of the Mersey World section, so they weren't really featured (though they remain more than twice as popular as anything else on the Connect/Mersey World server !). The Brookside character David ("Bing") Crosby was there, though all I saw of him was his fancy slacks making an exit for the door :-) I took a couple of days off to recover from the launch of course...

• Monday 16th October
  Amidst the panic for tomorrow's Mersey World launch (see above), I uploaded the results for Lottery #48.

• Thursday 12th October
  Activated [albeit with some problems !] the Netscape Commerce Server in both secure and insecure mode on the Connect WWW server. There was no change needed to the lottery CGI code because Netscape's server is compatible with the NCSA Server we'd been running previously.

  In case you're wondering why the October updates to the lottery pages have been somewhat sparse, well it's because 2 major events are coming up: 1) the signing of an R&D contract and sponsorship deal for the virtual lottery and 2) there is a major launch of Mersey World next Tuesday (invitation only !) and the past couple of weeks have been frantic to say the least. You might like to see the fruits of this - the new "shopping basket" principle of the Mersey Mall for instance, the ability to browse anywhere in secure mode (requires Netscape 1.1 or later) and also the steady stream of new organisations appearing on Mersey World - remember that if you're a Merseyside company, you get free Web space and we'll even scan in your paper documents and compose HTML for you for free ! I've yet to see anyone else in the UK do this for their county...

• Wednesday 11th October
  Yep, the infamous electricity sub-station broke down again and it took us half a day to get things working correctly again.

• Monday 9th October
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #47, which had possibly the freakiest sequence so far (4th consecutive appearance of the number 10).

• Sunday 8th October
  A fire broke out in an electricity sub-station that feeds our entire department, so the Connect server amongst about 200 other machines were unavailable for the best part of a day :-(

• Friday 6th October
  Added a new lottery calendar page which is a mix of info from Camelot's Reports and Accounts and from the UK media.

• Thursday 5th October
  Received Camelot's Reports and Accounts through the post, which covered up until 31st March 1995 (I guess the next set of accounts are due soon then).

• Monday 2nd October
  Uploaded the results for Lottery #46.

Previous month: September 1995

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