Brilliant, thank you all. I like the 2!:0 'cat /dev/urandom|od -N4 -An -i' most as I find it easily intelligible, but _everyone_ has been extremely helpful. I'm impressed.
True confessions: I likely won't make _major_ use of /dev/random but I wanted to get it working. I will share the knowledge. I really like J and I'm trying to explore its plethora of strong points and its few limitations. I love its elegant design, which seems intent on avoiding the von Neumann bottleneck, and the fact that it's well thought out (unlike most of the clunky languages we're shackled with). The problem of course with /dev/urandom is that it may not have sufficient entropy for durable crypto, and /dev/random blocks. A simple, cheap and better random generator might be to amplify the avalanche noise from a Zener diode and then read this using a PC's sound card (I'm currently playing with a little circuit that does just this, so I might have some pesky questions on reading the sound card in a few days' time :-) Jo. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
