now with more random goodness
July 20th, 2005 by herichon
Using other people’s PHP scripts is sometimes a bad idea. I was irritated by the clearly-not-really-random output of the random image box so I went in to look at the code, and as it turned out it was using a really hokey clearly-not-really-random seed, so after replacing it with mt_rand() I am finding the output behaves much better.
Of course I am probably the only one who’s anal enough to have noticed at this point, which is why this post is going under the Geekiness category. 
In other geeky news, there are now around 250 images in the Box-o-Randomness, which makes it that much less likely that any individual visitor will see anything they might actually want to see. Yay! I think based on a conversation with Alex a few days ago that I might be adding some kind of gallery, or at least a way to switch to a less-random mode, for those who might want to see all of the images. Actually what might be fun is some sort of guess-the-image-source kind of quiz, though the coding for that might be a bit hairy. Will have to give that some thought.
I wonder what it says about my mind lately that I make this spiffy new journal (which presumably is designed for the word-based kind of expression) and most of the work I’ve done on it so far has been to clip and tweak and crop hundreds of images for the random image box? I guess I feel more like expressing myself in pictures lately. For what it’s worth, when I’m done dropping stuff into that box (probably another 300-400 images to go) it will be a nice “my life and interests in pictures” sort of thing. I might not even need a journal at that point, I could just drop the box on a website and leave it at that.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled geekiness elsewhere… maybe now that I got that little bug worked out I’ll be able to get some sleep.