Both a description and a philosophy

Ick and averages

December 22nd, 2025

I had a bucket of good intentions but then.....urgh! The requirements to be social at this time of year has drawbacks and one of them is the spread of bugs, germs and snot-bearing virus things. Just about getting over it now but I do not have the standard happiness yet owing to the upcoming Christmastide. Getting ill makes things difficult. Still, definitely better than last year!

I have been thinking about my next little building block. I was thinking of something not program-based but I cannot seem to make the space for anything at the moment. Again, the time of year and lots of people visiting or wanting visitors makes this something to think about in the new year. So, another computing-based thing. I have been wondering where the path should lead from the last article, which was about generating random numbers to simulate a basic yes/no output. I got stuck with the decision making so I made a list and flipped some coins, which means that I did use the programs for some practical purpose after all.

So, the next article will be about numerical averages. I have done a little work on this before so it should not take too long. It seems a good step as randomness, averages and variation are all significant parts of statistics which have a great bearing on modern life. We now have tools and technology to study our habits in ways that were impossible even in relatively recent times. So any small step in understanding averages and variation is important. So....here goes.

Seasons greetings to one and all!

Always do your research before making a decision

December 3rd, 2025

So I finally made a decision and I even posted it. Then I started looking up my old notes, for I have not been programming for a long time. I started looking up random number algorithms and decided that something akin to RC4 would be enough for my needs for the coin-flipping programming exercise. Then I did a little looking on the internet and found out two things:

• Getting old sucks! Just take one single eye off the ball for a short fraction of time and an egg-on-face moment will always occur
• Since 2022, not that long ago, RC4 in the form of arc4random has been a standard part of the C library on GNU Linux

In addition, arc4random appears to be awsome. It is automatically seeded by the computer's internal entropy generator and generates 32-bit unsigned integers. If I were doing this for work, then this would be fantastic but this basically kills off any challenge element that I had. What I had thought of as a small project has now turned into a few lines of code. I did know this had been available on OpenBSD for a while but now it is already to hand. D'ohhh!

However, I accept that this is Seiryoku Zenyo in action. Rather than give up, I will persue this, now much smaller, endeavour just to see where this goes. On the plus side, I get two build up other sections of this website and see it evolve slowly.

Here goes (next to) nothing then!