Test data is often a bottleneck on testing projects. Security and privacy issues can require complex massaging of existing information, Today, there are tools to make it easy to create it from scratch! I find two in particular quite useful.

I’ve been telling people about generatedata.com for several years. It is an amazing tool for generating data for customers or other items, including items chosen from lists and data ranges. It is free, customizable and can even be run off a USB (after it is customized for the computer and database etc).

...is now officially my favourite song. We all have that list of human beings that we're desperately glad we discovered. Mine includes people like Carl Sagan, Roger Penrose, Frank Zappa, Maurice Ravel, Douglas Adams, Tom Baker (kind of hard to miss if you were born in Cheshire in the seventies) and now the truly gobsmacking Devin Townsend. His new album, Addicted, is in shops on Nov 17th.