A little faster. To see how much (quite a bit) you might want to try Benchmark.pm:

$lastname =~ s/^([a-z])/\u$1/;
[download]

Or if you want a cool one that will init cap an entire string (but without the eval overhead of ucfirst):

$txt =~ s/\b(\w+)/\u\L$1/g;
[download]

my @a=qw(random brilliant braindead); print $a[rand(@a)];