Startup Riot 2012 is done; congratulations to the winners

Startup Riot 2012 at the Tabernacle in Atlanta was enjoyable and informative.  Anytime you get that many entrepreneurs and investors together in one place, good things will happen.  The conversations alone are well worth the price of admission.

Congratulations to the winners:

1. ViaCycle
2. SalesLoft
3. Driver.ly

Three minute pitches in front of a live audience and a panel of celebrity judges are tough. You all stuck your necks out in a big way and came home with the prize.  Good job!

[Rails] Good Random Positive Integer

Tonight I needed a quick way to generate a good pseudo random number.  The following statement in Ruby will generate a positive integer between 0 and the maximum integer supported on the system.

SecureRandom.random_number((2**(0.size * 8-2)-1))

Running that 10 times as a test on my system returned:

• 479960941838047707
• 4598189742420362323
• 4319555246297899788
• 79907720343840910
• 1019099276589074756
• 1753578159791031009
• 51485412595337811
• 3333462064391733874
• 2622897372121370782
• 4287564549349999056

That's all for tonight.

Sources

• Secure random number generator interface
• Ruby max integer