Ok, so here's the deal. I've started to dally with Flash a bit, and I'm feeling all naked without my nifty Prototype functionality.

Most important to me are the bind() and curry() functions (though, others will rear their heads as my AS code gets more complex), Object.extend, and $A. They are para-ported here.

This little function does great for passwords, usernames, files, and anything else you need a random string for.

This is a simple script to generate a random alphanumeric string.

This is a random password generator that produces understandable passwords based on word lists. I've only included a 3 entry world list because you should chose a list based on your password requirements and your users. If you need to generate passwords that are 14 characters in length, you will want a different list than if you're generating 8 character passwords. And depending on your users, you may want to use certain lists. The list I use is about 4000 words that are 5-7 characters long, all well-known words that have had potentially objectionable content removed. For security reasons I don't want to include this list.

A note on security: though this generates relatively strong passwords for the average user, they are particularly susceptible to brute-force attacks. This is even more an issue if somehow your word list gets compromised. I would not recommend using this function for anything where a highly secure password is needed.

A note on choosing your list: You'll also see that I've built the system to avoid generating passwords with zeros and ones in them. This is because zero and upper-case "o" can be confused as can one, lower-case "L" and upper-case "i." When choosing my word list I was also sure to strip out all words that start with the letter "o" or "i" (to prevent the optional ucfirst() from creating 0/O and I/1 confusion) and words that contain the letter "L" (to prevent l/1 confusion). I find that this greatly helps with preventing confusion, but again weakens the security of the passwords some. It's your choice.

create a random string of 16 chars

This snippet illustrates using Genetic Algorithm for the hardware optimization.

Genetic Algorithm implementation.

See also "Weighted random selection" for RandomItemSelector class source.

Weighted random selection from the list.

Don't forget to call itemsChanged after updating list content.

I think that the problem comes when you populate a DataGrid's dataProvider with data from a a remoting call, such as a RecordSet returned from AMFPHP. The remoting protocol doesn't remember the datatype of each database column, so once you get the RecordSet back to ActionScript everything has become a String. You could go to the trouble of casting every numeric column's contents in the RecordSet to a Number so that the DataGrid will sort those columns numerically (1, 2, 3, ...) rather than lexicographically (1, 10, 11, ..., 2, 20, ...)... or you could throw this quick little function in and tell it which columns you consider numeric. It will replace the default sorting behavior with one that casts to numbers before comparing, when dealing in the columns you specify. Pass it an array of the columns' indices and the DataGrid in question. Non-numeric strings in the columns you specify will get treated as 0 and left unsorted at the top.

This function creates relatively secure random passwords. It's by no means ideal, but it should work in most non-critical situations. The nice thing is the generator attempts to create passwords that people can pronounce and chooses letters that won't be mistaken for others (such as the numeral "1", an upper-case "i" and a lower-case "L"). To keep the code short much of this functionality is very rudimentary, but it's better than nothing.