Building a random name generator

Friday, 2011.10.21 J.D. H. Leave a comment

Last night I had fun building a little random name generator for my friend Adam and my wife. They both write and sometimes it is difficult to come up with names for characters, that is where the new tool comes in handy:

Character Name Generator

Every time you refresh the page you get a new name 🙂

I used to code a lot of fun little projects like this but lately I have not made time for it. I do best at these projects when I have a contiguous chunk of time (3-6 hours) to really delve into and just keep plowing through any obstacles that may arise. For instance last night, actually choosing a random name was trivial, but getting my source data (txt file) imported into a MySQL DB actually took a bit of doing.

Anyhoo, I plan on improving the name generator and making time to do some more fun (and useful) little projects in the future 🙂

Here are a few resources that I utilized (or just found along the way) in making the name generator:

Tricks with Notepad++ | a4apphackhttp://a4apphack.com/featured/tricks-with-notepadNotepad++ is an amazing text editor which not just gives you option to edit and save your text files, but also gives lot many features which can help you in doing magic.

Windows Text Editor For Large Files | KerryOnWorldhttp://www.kerryonworld.com/software/windows-text-editor-for-large-filesThis wee morning I was forced to play around with a huge text file of geographic data. And just how big was it you say? 781 megabytes. This is not a job for Windows Notepad…

Tail for Win32 – Home Pagehttp://tailforwin32.sourceforge.net/

Selecting random record from MySQL database table. ~ Blog ~ Akinashttp://akinas.com/pages/en/blog/mysql_random_row/The problem with this method is that it is very slow. The reason for it being so slow is that MySQL creates a temporary table with all the result rows and assigns each one of…

How to get the execution time of a MySQL query from PHP? – Stack Overflowhttp://stackoverflow.com/questions/4501876/how-to-get-the-execution-time-of-a-mysql-query-from-phpThere probably some way to do this via MySQL, however, the easy (and reliable) way is using PHP’s microtime function, which returns the current time as milliseconds.

PHP MySQL Connect to a Databasehttp://www.w3schools.com/php/php_mysql_connect.asp

PHP: ucfirst – Manualhttp://php.net/manual/en/function.ucfirst.phpPHP Manual Function Reference Text Processing Strings String Functions addcslashes addslashes bin2hex chop chr chunk_ split convert_ cyr_ string convert_ uudecode convert_…

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J.D. Hodges

Every man has a story, this is my story.

Building a random name generator

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