Apropos of my recent interview with Tantek Çelik about URL shorteners, I've ported his NewBase60 code (part of his CASSIS project) to perl. It's now found on github at
<http: github.com="" sivy="" tinwhistle="">. This code converts numbers (in this case, dates expressed as days-since-the-epoch) into a base60 (sexagesimal) representation that's really short. For example, '1971-06-29' becomes '94', and '2010-05-26' becomes '45v'.</http:>