Testimonials

I make mixed media animations as a hobby, and have recently been exploring non-sequential abstract patterns, as both a visual ‘static’ effect, and as dynamic planes and surfaces for figures. While sometimes a typological approach appropriate, like taking a photo of a section of every page in the weekly newspaper and running it at high speed so it becomes non-figurative (to be used as an overcast sky), I often need more specific sorts of abstract, and drawing or otherwise generating thousands of frames of images, often for a minute or two of footage can be time consuming. So, I routinely get around this by making a fraction of that amount, and I used to pad the remaining time out by repeating frames in 'random' order, off the top of my own head, results less than impressive. Now, thanks to your random, I generate integers corresponding to existing frames, which eliminates obvious loops and repetitions, creating a much more believable and smooth non-sequential series.

Also, being subject to whimsy, I occasionally include snapshots of said numbers in the odd frame, or even the URL, considering it subliminal advertising.

—Dominic Brown

I'm using the random numbers to help me create block ciphers for custom encryption routines. I do this more out of fun though a lot of my ‘research’ ends up in production systems. I've actually contributed to your third party HTTP clients. I wrote the ASP contribution. I'm particularly pleased to see the sequence generator. This is absolutely critical for my latest project—developing an ASCII friendly encryption routine for email and web use. In this sort of application, I use ASCII values with a value 32 pedestal and a 126 threshold to eliminate any special characters from being used (and likely altered) by an email or web transfer protocol. Results thus far have been great.

—Randy Tate