What's the best way to create a short hash, similar to what tiny Url does?

Question

I\'m currently using MD5 hashes but I would like to find something that will create a shorter hash that uses just [a-z][A-Z][0-9]. It only needs to be around 5-

Answer 1

There's a wonderful but ancient program called btoa which converts binary to ASCII using upper- and lower-case letters, digits, and two additional characters. There's also the MIME base64 encoding; most Linux systems probably have a program called base64 or base64encode. Either one would give you a short, readable string from a 32-bit CRC.