Randomness and reseeding?

[Susan Margulies]

Hello, everyone! I am generating many, many numbers between 0 and 1. I 
am using gmp_randclass and setting it to gmp_randinit_default, and 
then seeding it with a read from /dev/random/ using some code gotten 
off the web.

However, I began to notice that as I did more and more trials (like a 
million), it seemed as if I was loosing the randomess. I was not 
reseeding my random number generator... should I do that? If so, after 
about how many trials? I noticed experimentally that if I reseeded too 
often from /dev/random, the first time it reads 128 bytes, and the 
rest of the times it only reads 8 bytes. Maybe it hasn't saved up 
enough randomess between reads?

I also tried combinations of reading from /dev/random and reseeding 
using the system time. Seeding from /dev/random defintely seems to 
work better.

I can see that I really don't understand these random number 
generators. Can someone advise me how to generate 2 million numbers 
between 0 and 1 with a uniform distribution? How can I find a really 
high quality seed?

Here is the code I pulled from the web:

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);
      if (bytes_read != 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 );
}

I don't know what he does the & here.... he seemed to say he needed to 
format the numbers according the what gmp_rand_class needed.

Thank you very, very much for any input that you have.

Best,
Susan