New Features for the Fake Name Generator!

Hur­ray! New features!

I’ve been work­ing hard to bring some new fea­tures to the Fake Name Gen­er­a­tor, and here they are:

• A handy terms of ser­vice that you are required to accept before view­ing a gen­er­ated name! Hur­ray! Actu­ally I was forced to add this by my web host. Oh well.
• Cana­dian addresses. This much requested fea­ture has finally been added. We now can gen­er­ate addresses for 10 Cana­dian provinces/territories. More coun­tries on the way!
• Aus­tralian addresses. Yup. Another coun­try. Street names need some work (not very Aus­tralian sound­ing) but the city/state/zip/phone num­bers are pretty on target.
• Styles. There are now two choices for the gen­er­ated name: nor­mal and uncom­mon. Nor­mal will use the weighted list of names to show very plaus­able names. Uncom­mon will select from the least com­mon names to gen­er­ate some­thing a lit­tle more unusual. For exam­ple, Oswaldo Loughnan.
• More email addresses. I have added another 4 email providers. Your ran­dom name will ran­domly use one of them. I fig­ure the vari­ety will make the data more useful.
• Bulk order options. You can now select which coun­tries and gen­ders you want to receive in your bulk iden­tity orders.
• Age cal­cu­la­tor. Hold your mouse over the birth­date for a few sec­onds and a tooltip should popup telling you how old a per­son would be who was born on that date.

Thats about it I think. I’d like to make addresses avail­able for the top 10 vis­it­ing coun­tries, which include:

• Slove­nia (not exactly sure where or what this is.. Other than the United States, they are the most fre­quent visitors..)
• United King­dom
• Swe­den
• Spain
• Ger­many
• France
• Italy

If you don’t see your coun­try listed, tell your friends in your coun­try about the Fake Name Gen­er­a­tor! If you can gen­er­ate enough traf­fic, then I’ll add your country.

Update 6÷28÷2006: Added some neat code. If you haven’t selected a coun­try, the page will deter­mine what coun­try you are vis­it­ing from, and if it is Aus­tralia, it will dis­play an Aus­tralian address, and if from Canada, a Cana­dian address, or United States if any other country.

In addi­tion, fixed a bug that was caus­ing some ran­dom iden­ti­ties to be repeated. We are re-generating bulk order files to send as replace­ments for defec­tive files.

Update 6÷29÷2006: Improved upon the ran­dom­iza­tion code even more, so hope­fully things will be get­ting very random.

Also added the abil­ity to pur­chase bulk order files with Social Secu­rity Num­bers or Aus­tralian Social Insur­ance Num­bers. An SSN/SIN would be use­less out­side of test­ing, and you need many if you are going to be test­ing some­thing, so the only way to get them is to order them.

Another fun fea­ture: The birth­day on the Aus­tralian gen­er­a­tor page is dis­played in Aus­tralian fash­ion (i.e., 29 June 2006). Cana­dian dates are still shown in “Month Day, Year” for­mat because I have no way of know­ing if the vis­i­tor speaks French or not, and I think the Eng­lish Cana­di­ans do dates like us Americans.

In addi­tion, you can now gen­er­ate French names. Fig­ured this would be use­ful for all those French-Canadians. Our French name selec­tion is cur­rently very lim­ited (only about 20,000 unique com­bi­na­tions), so please con­tact us if you have access to a list of French given names or surnames.

And now to make the Cana­dian gen­er­a­tor even bet­ter, the streets are local­ized. That means that the street that is dis­played is actu­ally one that could very likely exist in that city. Many of the street names are even French! Hope this helps our Cana­dian vis­i­tors some…