Research into randomness

daniel@mettlers.info — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 23:00:00 GMT

I wanted to create random-looking URL-Parameters similar to the way YouTube does it. There you don't have a movie number in the URL, but rather something that looks pretty strange like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaSsAjdF-Bg, so the uaSsAjdF-Bg is somehow a number replacement. Here's what I discovered

An article explaining the .net randomizer, and the way you would retrieve a number after the other. I'll have to find out how many numbers are generated till it repeats, and if I can use the last random number as a seed to ensure I stay in the sequence.
A Wikipedia article explaining the Mersenne Twister, a algorithm that returns a heck of a lot of random numbers without repeating for a very, very long time.
A open source / free .net class with a bunch of different randomizers, including fibonaci and mersenne twister.
Another Marsenne Twister code for .net
The .net Framework documentation explaining the Random object. Apparently it uses the (quote from page) "The current implementation of the Random class is based on Donald E. Knuth's subtractive random number generator algorithm. " It doesn't say how it repeats, but more research turned up a lot of technical stuff, so I assume it's very thought through (though not usable for encryption).

Search Providers

daniel@mettlers.info — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 15:48:42 GMT

I'm creating a list of Must-Have Search providers for Internet Explorer. Though they are simple to create yourself, I always end up doing it over and over and over whenever I get a new PC. This sucks, so I made this list to use whenever I need it.

Die Search Providers, die jeder haben müsste. Klick auf den jeweiligen Link um ihn zu installieren

Wikipedia

LEO (www.leo.org, dict.leo.org)

Techie Stuff

Research into randomness

Search Providers