My entry for today is a program that I wrote tonight (took me
longer than expected, I'm afraid—like, all night). Not an
interesting program by any means: just a pseudo-random number
generator, an ARC4 stream, to be precise; it can be
downloaded here:
arc4gen.c (instructions for use and compilation are
contained in the comments within the program itself; Public Domain),
and there is also a Debian
package for the same.
(What's the point of writing a self-standing random number generator, you ask? Well, one possible use is this: you generate a huge file from the ARC4 stream with a given key, and then you check it repeatedly against the stream generated anew from the same key—which should be the same since the generator is deterministic. Any CPU or RAM or filesystem malfunction is pretty likely to be noticed in the process. In fact, that's exactly the reason I wrote this thing: I suspect there's something wrong somewhere on my PC, and I intend to make sure.)