begin quoting Lan Barnes as of Tue, Jun 27, 2006 at 09:48:45AM -0700: > On Mon, Jun 26, 2006 at 05:53:10PM -0700, Stewart Stremler wrote: [snip] > > It's been half a year since I took a break from internyms. I sometimes > > miss 'em, but a sigmonster is beginning to sound appealing. > > It's a rewrite. The original (naive) effort was a stand-alone daemon in > perl, a good educational experience, but I shudder to recall it ... > rather like poetry one wrote to his 4th grade teacher.
I think I still have some of that. I am, alas, a poor poet, and I've never gotten better. > This is in Tcl (of course) and relies on cron for its execution. Nifty! > What I do regret losing, for lost it apparently is, is my old sigs > source file. If it ever turns up, I'll integrate it into the new one. :( > I have concerns that the random number generator ain't all that random. > Humans have a lousy intuitive sense of randomness (I think we're hard- > wired to find patterns even where there are none), and it seems to me > that some sigs appear far too often and others are ignored. I may turn > logging back on and let a week or so build up so I can scope the numeric > choices. I wrote a "rotsig" script, and I avoided the whole question of randomness; I merely work my way through the collection, in order. The effect is that I *appear* to have a fairly uniform distribution. A truly random distribution can end up with the same selection several times in a row -- what people typically *desire* from randomness is not that case. > Code available to anyone who asks nice ... but no snickering. I'm > already well aware of my shortcomings as a programmer :-( If I'm at all tempted to snicker, I'll show you my "rotsig". I never did rewrite it ... it's a stupid little shell script. Several people have gone on to enhance it, and then, I think, abandon it. > Oh, and FWIW, I for one always liked the internyms. Thanks. I did too, but I decided that Bill Watterson was right -- quit while you're still good. At a minimum, I figured I needed a sabbatical. -- _ |\_ \| -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
