This is pretty cool - had not seen it before.

​http://math.fullerton.edu/mathews/n2003/MonteCarloPiMod.html

​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method

Those of you with cygwin or unix and perl:

#!/usr/bin/perl
my $COUNT = 8; #Orders of magnitude
my $HIT = 0;

for(my $i = 1; $i < 10**$COUNT; ++$i){
        $HIT++ if rand()**2 + rand()**2 <= 1;
        printf "PI ~ %1.8f after %0${COUNT}i points\n", 4*$HIT/$i, $i if
               ($i % 1_000) == 0;
}

I got PI ~ 3.14155046 after 99999000 points and a second run with PI ~ 3.14160204 after 999990000 points

There are a lot of ways to do a "bash window here" in WinXP, but this is my fav by far. It gives you the proper unix style mouse buttons since it is a terminal window not just cmd. After installing it, right click on any directory:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\0cmd-rxvt]
@="Bash Window Here"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\0cmd-rxvt\command]
@="C:\\cygwin\\bin\\rxvt.exe -bg black -fg white -sr -sl 1000 -fn \"Fixedsys\" -ls -e /usr/bin/bash --login -c \"cd \\\"`cygpath -u '%1'`\\\"; exec bash\""

You may need to change the beginning of the last line if you installed in a different path, e.g. e:\cygwin\.

Updated March 2009

My buddy Bill told me there is now a Cygwin command xhere and a setup command chere that will do all the Registry insertions for you. So launch Cygwin in the default crappy shell (with admin privs) and you can type:

chere -i -af -t rxvt -o "-bg black -fg white -sr -sl 1000 -fn \"FixedSys\" -ls" -s bash -e "Bash prompt here"

You can change -af to -cf for current user only if you don't have admin on the machine.

Because he was kind enough to give it to me, I will give you his command which seriously hurts my eyes. I also prefer the default size and expand it if needed.

chere -i -af -t rxvt -o "-ls -sr -sl 1000 -bg grey70 -fg black -geometry 120x65+300+15 -fn 10x16 -title Bash" -s bash -e "Bash prompt here"