The actual randomizing wasn't the problem. I had something else going on that messed things up. The trick is the boundary of two cycles. An object can be the last thing of the first cycle and the first thing of the next cycle, so effectively gets chosen twice in a row, which is bad. I wanted to spread those apart. It's not big deal: just the stupid sort of stuff that happens at 3 in the morning. I had wanted this technique for something else, so I tried it out. It doesn't really take that much attention: as long as I look at it and there are only two colors, everything is fine.

I recall some odd problem with headers and that I had to remove something. I think I found the answer by plugging "curses perl mac os x" into Google. There is a fink port, and there is probably a Darwin Ports port too.

If you are going to use this on a Mac, the vt100 terminal type might not work for you. I switched to dtterm (there is also Apple_Terminal), which is really just changing the TERM environment variable however your avorite shell does that.