Has there been research into implementing randomness extractor constructions?

It seems that extractor proofs make use of Big-Oh, leaving the possibility for large hidden constants, making programmatic implementations potentially unrealistic.

Some context:
I'm interested in using randomness extractors as a fast source of (provably?) random numbers for use in Monte Carlo simulations. We (an ETHZ Computational Physics group) have biased high-entropy sources from quantum random number generators that we would like to extract randomness from. A previous student attempted to implement a [Trevisan construction](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~luca/pubs/t99stoc.ps) and ran into spacial complexity problems. Aside from that student, I have not found any reference to people trying to implement extractors.

Note:
I'm a CS undergrad who is very new to the area of Theoretical CS and Randomness Extractors.