I love finding a library that does exactly what it claims to do, and does it in the simplest way possible. Faker by Ben Curtis is a Ruby library, packaged as a Ruby Gem, that generates "fake data" for you, in the form of names, telephone number, e-mail addresses, addresses, and so forth.

For example:

Faker::Name.name  # => "Gwendolyn Wehner"
Faker::Internet.email # => "ava.conn@emmerich.info"
Faker::Internet.free_email # => "angelina.labadie@hotmail.com"
Faker::Internet.user_name # => "mitchel.heaney"

This could be particularly useful for throwing data at any libraries or systems you develop that need to process personal details.

I had trouble installing Faker in the usual way (with gem install faker) as the Ruby Gems server reports that the file could not be found. An easy workaround, for now, is to download the gem manually:

wget http://gems.rubyforge.org/gems/faker-0.2.0.gem
gem install faker