SF bug #778964: bad seed in python 2.3 random

The default seed is time.time().
Multiplied by 256 before truncating so that fractional seconds are used.
This way, two successive calls to random.seed() are much more likely
to produce different sequences.

Lib/random.py

@@ -94,6 +94,9 @@ class Random(_random.Random):
         If a is not None or an int or long, hash(a) is used instead.
         """
 
+        if a is None:
+            import time
+            a = long(time.time() * 256) # use fractional seconds
         super(Random, self).seed(a)
         self.gauss_next = None