by
Brian Madden
At BriForum 2007 Amsterdam, we ran into a little snag with our "prize-o-matic." (Yes, I recognize the irony of this after I bashed the "old school" business-card-from-a-box solution.)
Our Prize-o-matic application pulled a list of names via XML from the names of people who completed the final day survey. Unfortunately I forgot to save that file with UTF-8 encoding, so when our Prize-o-matic encountered a name with an accent mark, it stopped processing additional names. This meant that the raffle only contained names of the first 40 people or so.
We had already raffled off the Nintendo DS and iPod before someone in the audience pointed out the error. (D'oh!) So we decided that we would stop the raffle, correct the problem, and then hold a new raffle the following week for just the people whose names were not included in the original raffle. And since the two good prizes were picked by the first two winners, we told the audience that we'd buy a really cool, extra good prize to add back into the mix for the secondary drawing.
"iPhone," someone shouted from the audience.
An iPhone it is! I went to the Apple store in NYC and bought an iPhone, and then went to the park across the street to record the raffle with our corrected file in the Prize-o-matic.
The winners, in the order they won:
- Philip Hytting
- Martin Mason
- Ruben Giaccotto
Congratulations to you three! And thanks to everyone else for your patience while we sorted out this problem.
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