warmer / entrospection

graphical evaluation of entropy

entrospection

This gem includes tools to graphically describe the statistical qualities of random number generators.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'entrospection'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install entrospection

Usage

Included sample generators

Call the entropy generation tool 'entrogen' with the name of a generator and redirect the output to a file. To see a list of generators use the -h switch.

$ entrogen GENERATOR_NAME -l nnn > path-to-file

   GENERATOR   the name of one of the pseudo random number generators provided in the gem. 

   nnn         specifies a limit in bytes to afterwhich the stream terminates.
               when no limit is provided the generator will stream indefinitely.

Analysing and Viewing the results

Either call entrospect and provide the name of a file

$ entrospect <path-to-file>

or use entrogen to generate a stream that is piped into entrogen

$ entrogen md5 -l 10485760 | entrospect

The output of entrospect is a collection of ".png" files and a simple html report that can be opened in a browser. Each ".png" is named for the test that created the chart.