UK National Lottery Automatic Page Generator

• An HP PA-RISC rp3410 dual-CPU server running HP-UX 11.11 with 4GB RAM.

• I also have a faster Dell Optiplex GX280 machine that runs Fedora Core 2 Linux to generate the Best Performing Tickets page. The site code "mostly" works on Linux, but there's still some porting issues surrounding a couple of tools.

• A Nildram ADSL Max 6Mbit/s (typically) connection hooked up to a Safecom ADSL wireless modem router.

• HP's ANSI C compiler with the -z +O2 +ESlit +w1 compiler options. Yes, it's the latest compiler version and, no, I'm not compiling in ANSI mode any more because of the use of macros that don't expand correctly with ANSI cpp. However, I can compile OK with gcc now (using -traditional-cpp).

• A custom C program, called "bhs", which passes macroised HTML through a hacked XView 3.2 C pre-processor (see below) to generate an expanded HTML file. I maintain a single header file containing the macros to be expanded and then edit .bhs files (using vi of course) containing a mixture of HTML and macro calls, which are then processed by bhs and previewed with Netscape 4.79. The ability to use macros, particularly for headers and footers, allows rapid changes to whole sets of pages to be achieved by a single edit of the macro header file and then a re-run of bhs, which can recurse down the whole tree and regenerate HTML from changed (or all) .bhs files if I wish to do so.

• An extensively hacked version of the C pre-processor (cpp) software that was supplied with XView 3.2 (an OpenLook look-and-feel clone released by Sun into the public domain for other UNIX systems). The original was written by Martin Minow for a VAX/VMS machine and ported to UNIX shortly after. My hacks just make it a bit more "HTML-friendly", rather than aiming it exclusively at C. The latest change is that the standalone cpp program has been converted into a shared library instead (is this unique ?) and the "bhs" command is now directly linked against that library.

• A custom C program to take my data file of lottery results and convert it into a header file of C data that can be #included into the source code of the C programs mentioned below. It also does formulaic verification of lottery results and issues warnings if any don't tally. The other task of the program is to calculate frequencies (both with and without the bonus number) and generate them as C arrays for including into the source code in a similar manner to the raw results mentioned above. Note that the C programs mentioned below can #include the bhs macro header file and hence generate the appropriate headers and footers to match the "manual" equivalent.

  The whole reason for generating C header files containing arrays is that by embedding the data in the C program, it makes it independent of data files. This means that no file opening/reading/closing is needed when running the program and this results in a huge performance boost, particularly for CGI execution.

• Two custom multi-purpose lottery C programs, which do all of the following:
  • Creates the top-level page, which can optionally include automatic provisional results.
  • Creates all of the Numerical Analysis and Sales Figures pages.
  • Acts as a CGI program to the:
    • Have You Won ?
    • Lottery Perms
    • Lottery Links Search
    • All Winning Numbers
    • Multiple Ticket Checker
    • Lucky Dip
    • Number Palace
    • Live Updates Registration Form
    • Live Updates Overall Status
  • Verifies the prize amounts and number of winners for each draw's lottery by using the same formula as Camelot does.
  • Manages the Live Updates system.
  • Duplicates much of the above for the Thunderball and Extra sections of the site.

• A custom X11R6 C program which can dump a graphic containing the balls for any particular lottery without now needing to open a window at all. It now calls the montage command mentioned below itself for efficiency and can also regenerate the entire set of lottery GIFs with a single command. The same program now also generates the mini-lottery ball navigation graphics at the footers of most pages and also all the graphical frequency charts.

• A custom speech CGI C program that uses 24 sound samples of my voice to construct any floating-point number between -1 billion and 1 billion. At the moment, I've set up a couple of links on the home page to say the latest draw's winning numbers and the jackpot amount, plus you can hear any of the previous set of winning numbers by going to a particular individual lottery page.

• A custom C program to generate the entire Lottery Links section (even the index page) from a plain text data file. The lottery sites data file is now over 2,000 lines long !

• The ImageMagick suite of utilities - I use the import command to dump an X11 window in GIF format (7 balls) or miff format (single balls) and montage to concatenate miff bitmaps together for the CGI program. The transparency and interlacing of ball GIFs are handled entirely by those two programs as well.

• A ksh script to tie all the software above together which generates all the pages (and the latest GIF) with a single command. It can also offer levels of update (e.g. just the newsflash and home page, just the pages with an expiry boundary on them etc. etc.).

• Many other cron jobs to automatically "housekeep" the pages, including GIF cache purging, lottery logo colour changes, virtual lottery entry total updates, lottery link checking and Live Updates entry resetting.

• The xpaint package, which whilst being primitive, was handy for a quick and dirty temporary GIF at the top of each page.

• The Apple Macintosh, scanner and Adobe Photoshop used to scan in the official logo [and my winning cheques], not that I'm allowed to use that logo :-(

This page wasn't automatically generated - ha ha !

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