A visitor pointed out that switching back to the American name set wasn’t working because of a mistake in the code, so we went ahead and fixed it.

Thanks Kadaj!

Modified the index on the American last names table to significantly increase performance. We should now be able to deliver bulk order American names MUCH faster.

Found a variable that was not capitalized properly, which was causing French names to occasional not show up.

We’ve permanently moved to FakeNameGenerator.com.

We have added many more French names, bringing the total number of distinct names to over 100,000 475,000.

During the update process, several damaged names were introduced into the French name set. We think we’ve fixed the problem, but please let us know if you come across an obviously defective name.

The beginnings of the US street localization project are completed. There are now 1,256 unique streets in the US database. Next step is to increase that number to about 3,000.

The next project that we are working on is adding a Hispanic name set.

One of the main goals of the Fake Name Generator is to provide quality test data. In order to help accomplish this goal, we have put in a lot of time and effort to make the addresses displayed for Canada and Australia more authentic.

For example, addresses in Canada will often reflect the language that is spoken in the city/province given. Australian streets will sometimes end in “Crescent”. Overall, we hope this provides a more authentic experience.

The next step of course is to provide better US street names. This project will take much longer (probably a week or two) due to the sheer volume of information we have on US cities and states.

Instead of cluttering my personal blog with a bunch of Fake Name Generator stuff, I’ve put up a basic installation of WordPress. Hopefully people will find this useful.