Andy Chase

A long time ago I wrote a PHP app called “Cromulac” (A perfectly cromulent generator of random words) that chewed up /usr/share/dict/words and spit out plausible but usually fake words using Markov chains.

Last night I wanted to apply the same technique to a list of New England town names, but on digging up my old PHP code found it ugly and somewhat hard-coded with the dictionary file in mind, so I wrote a new implementation in Python and released it on github:

http://github.com/usonian/cromulac

It’s a more or less procedural script that’s pretty ugly itself, but it gets the job done; here are some imaginary New England towns you might like to visit:

• Scrabansfield
• Easton Point
• Orlanton
• Tapline
• Tar Ridge
• Aubury
• Havens City
• Orwellin
• Coatuckett
• Craffolk
• Wesset
• Atkinsville

I may or may not reorganize it as more of a module, so it can be used by other Python scripts too.

Back from the dead, I finally found an archive of the ColorChip library I wrote 7 years ago. Currently PHP4-only (the class has a method called ‘clone’, which is a reserved keyword in PHP5) but I plan to fix that pretty quickly. In the meantime, I’ve hosted the project code on Google. You can grab the latest release from the project homepage at:

http://code.google.com/p/colorchip/

Released under the GPL license.