Question about random seed?

[Susan Margulies]

Hello! I confess I copied some code from the web without really 
worrying about it too much. But now, I am not quite sure that it has 
good random behavior.

Here is my code to set the seed:

        char dat[RAND_LEN];
        int bytes_read;

        /* get random seed */
        memset(dat, 0, RAND_LEN*sizeof(char));
        Graph::read_random(dat, bytes_read);
        mpz_class seed(dat);
        gmp_randclass r(gmp_randinit_default);
        r.seed(seed);

And here is my read_random:

/* read random bits from /dev/random/ for generating random graphs */
void Graph::read_random(char *dat, int &bytes_read) {
   //const char *dev = "/dev/urandom";
   const char *dev = "/dev/random";
   int i, fd;

   fd = open(dev, O_RDONLY);
   if (fd != -1 ) {
      bytes_read = read(fd, dat, RAND_LEN);
      //printf("read_random: read %d bytes from %s\n", bytes_read, 
dev);
      for( i = 0; i < bytes_read; i++ ) {
         dat[i] = (dat[i] & 0x07) + '0';
      }
      //printf("%s: %s\n", dev, dat );
   } else {
      printf("ERROR! Failed reading from %s\n", dev);
      exit(1);
   }
   close( fd );
}

My RAND_LEN is 1024. On the web, the person seemed to say that he did 
the & step to put the data in the format appropriate for the seed. 
Does this seem reasonable / necessary?

I need about 40,000+ numbers uniformly distributed between 0 and 1. Am 
I doing the right thing here? My code is behaving "strangely". When I 
try to get a baseline of some probability tests, I found a 90% sucess 
rate for a particular thing that I am calculating. But sometimes when 
I try to calculate that result, I can do trial after trial after trial 
without a success. If my rate really is 90%, that shouldn't happen... 
which is why I thought that maybe I wasn't using the randomness quite 
right.

I would love some advice! I read the documentation, but it didn't 
quite answer my question.

Thank you very much for your time!

Best,
Susan