Saturday, July 30, 2011

Interim blog

I've been very busy mostly not writing screenplays or any of that sort of creative.

Instead I've been doing a different sort of creative, working on a website that will hopefully generate some cash for me (sorry Chris not Voidships) it's a web developer - or indeed any programmer - kind of thing, of absolutely no use to any writer - except (weirdly) it just might be.

I shall explain:

Sometimes programmers have to write code that can import files from other places, but a major probklem can be not actually having a sample file to import - a lack of test data. Well there are tools that can create these kinds of files but most of them are too powerful and too expensive for your mid-range developer. And I did find one online generator that will do this sort of thing but it's not as flexible as I wanted.

So I've been building this thing, and yes it does have relevance to writers because one of the things it does is create character names. Like this:
Mr Jacob Collingwood, Mr Kurt Fisher, Dr Kira Drury, Mrs Brianna Underwood, Mrs Georgina Blake, Mr John Hubbard, Mrs Beryl Smith, Mr Lesley Dahl, Dr Alexander Hubbard, Ms Eliza Moffat
I don't have a huge selection of names yet. And it'll do addresses, social security numbers, email addresses, date of birth, and not just UK - you can select the country (initially just a few). Ultimately there'll be an ethnicity selection for names as well but probably not in the first released version.

Anyway I thought the name generator might come in handy. (Of course you could just use this: http://online-generator.com/ )

More writer-relevant stuff to come soon, I hope.


What's on the turntable? Screenwriter UK podcast by Danny Stack and Tim Clague (whoo-hoo) at http://j.mp/q0cjKf 

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