###The Problem:

How do you create URLs that are short, easy to remember, and unique?  Also, how do you store 60M rows so they are easily accessable?

###Getting the data

Get all 5 letter permutations for the letters between `a` and `z` as well as `A` through `F`.

###The Source

First, you get all the permutations and write them to disk.

    #! /bin/ruby

    open('/tmp/random.out', 'w') do |f|
      (('a'..'z').to_a + ('A'..'L').to_a).permutation(5) do |p|
        f.puts [p.to_a.join, Time.now.to_s(:db), Time.now.to_s(:db)].join(',')
      end
    end

Why disk?  Having a flat file would allow you do do interesting things like pipelining to redis, or `LOAD DATA` calls in mysql.

###Storage

Ok, so we got the data, but how do we store it?  First though was redis, so we did this:

###Questions

Why did we stop at `F`?  Franky, we felt like approximately 60 million hashes would get us by for a while.  We can always generate more.