I recently had a need to create a ton of fake users to test a system I’m building for a client. This required more than your average “tuser1″ type one-offs. I need to stress the system, so I dusted off an old post over on the most excellent Signal vs. Noise blog written by the 37 Signals guys who recently went through a similar need when building their Highrise contact manager. A Google search and some good, old fashioned hunting revealed the post I was looking for.

For demo purposes, we’ve had to populate Highrise with a bunch of fake people. Here are some of the sites we used to save time and increase randomness while creating these make-believe contacts:

The Random Name Generator pulls first and last names from a couple of genealogy sites. Some fun ones that turned up: Garfield Morland, Juniper Pinney, Keaton Dimsdale, and Seymour Zeal.

A search for “John Smith” at whitepages.com provides addresses and phone numbers (we change the street and phone numbers by a couple of digits).

Plambeck.org has a company name generator that serves up choices like Sems Research, Cadridium, Nated Design, etc. 2robots.com also offers a Random Business Name Generator.

For job titles, The Economic Research institute has a huge list. And there’s also GigantaMegaCorp’s Job Title Generator which spits out random ones like Inter Purchasing Planner, Senior Engineering Associate, and Foreign Information Processor.

[via Making Random Contacts by Matt Linderman]

I found the White Pages method unusable for bulk-applications, so I turned up an ancient app for The Windows called RandomData 2.3 by Geoff Phillips. The trial version cranked out fake addresses like nobody’s business and I was off to the races.

I’ll also throw in some custom PHP functions for good measure:

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function generateFakeIP()
{

    return rand(12,97).’.’.rand(1,255).’.’.rand(0,255).’.’.rand(1,255);
}

function genFakeEmail($username,$company)
{

    $retStr = strtolower($username.’@’.$company);
    $retStr = str_replace(’ ‘,”,$retStr);

    $domain = array(’com’,'com’,'com’,'com’,'net’,'edu’,'org’);

    $thisDomain = array_rand($domain);

    $retStr .= ‘.’.$domain[$thisDomain];

    return $retStr;

}

function genPhoneNums()
{

    $parenSet = array(array(’(',’) ‘,’-'),
                      array(’(',’) ‘,’-'),
                      array(’(',’) ‘,’-'),
                      array(’(',’) ‘,’-'),
                                        array(”,’ ‘,’-'),
                                        array(”,’ ‘,’-'),
                                        array(”,”,”),
                                        array(”,’.',’.'),
                                        array(”,’.',’.'),
                                        array(”,’.',’.'));

    $whichArr = array_rand($parenSet);
    $punctSet = $parenSet[$whichArr];

    $thisPhoneNum  = $punctSet[0];
    $thisPhoneNum .= getRandNums(3, false);
    $thisPhoneNum .= $punctSet[1];
    $thisPhoneNum .= getRandNums(3, true);
    $thisPhoneNum .= $punctSet[2];

    $thisCellNum   = $thisPhoneNum;

    $thisPhoneNum .= getRandNums(4, true);
    $thisCellNum  .= getRandNums(4, true);

    return array($thisPhoneNum, $thisCellNum);

}

function getRandNums($charCount, $canBeZero=true)
{
    $retStr = “;
    for($i=0; $i<$charCount; $i++)
    {
        if($canBeZero && $i==0)
        {
            $retStr .= rand(0,9);
        } else {
            $retStr .= rand(1,9);
        }
    }

    return $retStr;
}

Enjoy!

Tags: data loss, data recovery, the internet archive, the wayback machine

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 3:25 pm and is filed under Tips & Tricks . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.