random number generator followup

Mike Matthews matthews at is-next.umd.edu
Sat Dec 29 13:24:21 AEST 1990


Wow!  Talk about fast NetService!

The answer was, of course, obvious.  Dave Fetrow suggested I use the pid of
the process to seed the number generator, and terry at cogsci.indiana.edu added
a gettimefday call (which I haven't gotten to work yet, but it's a neato idea).

I have the crontab.local file run my script every minute now, and I haven't
heard a repeat yet.  It isn't truly random, with only using the pid as the
seed; it's a series, sort of -- the numbers increment by five in this case,
wrapping around of course.  This is fine with me, since the total number of
sounds I have for this cause (ahem) is not a multiple of five.

If any NeXT user is interested in the stuff, I'll Email the code to them.

I'm sure my office mates will kill me, too... :->

Mike



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