As some of you may know, I've been searching for the perfect business name.
I desperately wanted to avoid using a common name or phrase. I wanted to come up with something original that meant something to me and said something about my business. Most importantly, I wanted to avoid ending up with a TLA or YABA.
I played with a number of ideas. I scanned every page of a thesaurus. I enlisted the help of all my friends. At the end of it all, I simply wasn't satisfied with any of the names I came up with.
So, in typical computer geek fashion I decided to let a computer come up with my name. Afterall, my business is web related and I work with computers 99% of the time - so why not let a computer choose.
Begin New Zen Learning Adventure.
I scoured the web for random word generators and found a ton of cool information on 'markov chains' and a few fun and friendly tools.
One of them was "The Random Word Generator" at fourteenminutes.com. It supplied me with hours of entertainment - and came up with a ton of amuzing (if not useful) names for my business.
Still, as a tool, the random word generator at fourteenminutes didn't have the one feature that I was looking for. It did allow you to supply the first few letters of the word the site would create, but it didn't allow you to specify the letters that would end the word.
So, I got in touch with Richard at fourteenminutes.com and asked if the feature would be available in the future - and, if not, would he mind sharing the source code so I could figure something out for myself.
Richard, a very fine fellow indeed, soon responded and said (I'm paraphrasing) "Yeah, that'd be a nice feature - but I have no time to do it right now - since you're clearly a polite neato cool person I've attached a version of the source code".
"Right On!" I said.
So - armed with a perl script and a small database file I was off to the races. The only problem is that I'm not a perl programmer. I can read it; I've worked with it, but I've honestly never written anything in it.
No problem - its a heck of a lot like PHP (or PHP is a heck of a lot like perl) - So i decided to port the program. Right away I realized this might be a mistake. PHP wasn't designed to crunch the amount of data that this little program crunched. There was a reson this was written in perl. But, no problem - I would just have to squeeze a bit more efficiency out of the code.
After finding a few CPU savings I finally got my version of the random word generator working.
Then it was on to tackling the original problem: Random words that end in the letters I want. The idea was simple - just do what the random word generator does - but in reverse. So after re-jigging the database and fudging with the code a bit I did it. Its not perfect - and some of the CPU savings from my first version could not be applied to the new version - but it works.
You can try my reverse random word generator here.
So ends another Zen Learning experience
I still don't have a business name, but one can't be far behind when I have tools that come up with words such as:
pivolution
wrizio
lerpostion
bletruio
Then again - its the same tool that comes up with winners like:
infyhsnggrud
tchbectiudehidelznor
tbicglgrud
borecofsrup
*shrug*
andre
Posted by andre at August 10, 2004 04:33 AM