A more or less anonymous reader commented on our last post, where we were reading data from a file with a varying number of fields. The format of the file was:1 Las Vegas, NV --- 53.3 --- --- 12 Sacramento, CA --- 42.3 --- --- 2The complication in the...

Do the digits of Pi appear in a random order? If so, the trillions of digits of Pi calculated can serve as a useful random number generator. This post was inspired by this entry on Matt Asher's blog. Generating pseudo-random numbers is a key piece o...

In example 7.6 we showed how to retrieve the Amazon sales rank of a book. A cron job on one of our machines grabs the sales rank hourly. We’d like to use this data to satisfy our curiosity about when and how often a book sells. A complication is that ...