The thought occured to me while working on the concept of lonks. For the community edition I want to save URLs into a seperate table and just refer to them through IDs, so that they are not directly connected to the bookmark entries. That also reflects the idea of a somewhat normalized database and makes anonymizing referers more easy.

But the (random) IDs have to be in the right size from the start to last for eternity (or at least close to that). Otherwise some URLs could be identified to be created after a certain timestamp. On the other side they should be short enough to waste no unnecessary dataspace and don’t make the the referer URLs too long.

Just using numbers looks lame. But I can’t use all characters as well or there’ll be an ID that makes sense as a word. Maybe even a swear word. You don’t want http://lonks/nr1idiot to direct to your site, do you? Going hex is a bit restricted as well, but is the best common system.

In addition I thought of a system that splits the alphabet into chunks, which will makes it virtually impossible to create a word. I still have to figure out if that system is any good and how many IDs I can squeeze out of it with a decent amount of digits. If that won’t work out, I guess I’l stick to 4-16 digit hex (64 bit).

Okay, lets do the math with 4-16 digits (always including numbers) just for fun.

• hex
  18,446,744,073,709,486,080
• 3 no-vowel chunks
  194,644,767,472,667,473,927
• No vowels
  727,423,121,747,185,262,904,960
• All characters
  7,958,661,109,946,400,882,712,320

Maybe a case-sensitive character system will help to reduce the digits and/or increase the possible number of IDs. But maybe hex is enough… considering there won’t be the need to save every url of the internet anyway.

Am I thinking too much? Or am I just megalomaniac? Still the question remains… how many URLs are there?

Update: Just did the number crunching on a case-sensitive version of the 3 no-vowel chunks: 36,349,704,372,835,319,666,931 Somewhat a nice intermediate number. Looks mysterious and leet as well, so I might go for that. So many possibilities, that most of the time there won’t be the need to generate another random id, in case it is already in use. The speed of the queries and searches will be an interesting factor in the end, but I guess that problem will be solved when it arises.

• Building a Home-Theater-PC (HTPC)
  This is a combination of two ideas. First I wanted to hook up my television set to my computer, so I could put some videos, photo shows and stuff onto my TV. Very nice if you have guest and don’t want them all to swarm behind the computer. The second idea was to get a hi-fi system. I can only listen to music when my computer is running. Which is okay, as long as I don’t try to do something that puts some heavy load on the machine. But as soon as I play a game or render some image, it’s over. So now the idea is to set up a HTPC. This also allows me to run a file server, record from TV and do a bazillion other things. I also plan on connecting a wii-mote for some nice IR cam experiments. Of course it’ll run linux. Finding silent, electricity saving and linux-and-htpc-software compatible hardware will be the hardest part. And sparing a few hundred bucks, when I also need to get a car.
• lonks
  This is actually an old project. Two years ago I wrote a link manager, so I can keep my bookmarks online and don’t need to carry around a file for this or use a social bookmarking service (which wasn’t my idea of having my private links online). I stopped after it got usable for me. The original idea was an online service, but since laws are complicate, I didn’t pursue that idea any longer. A few weeks ago I got hooked up again. I will recode lonks and add lots of features. Not sure yet, if I will start a community, but if all goes well, there’ll be an open source edition for personal use on their own server.
• 3D
  Oh, I’ve been slacking on this stuff way too long. I’ve got dozens of ideas, but I really got to get more familiar with Blender again. Hopefully I can work on this soon enough. More when the time comes.
• Universal Aerial Video Plattform (UAVP)
  There’s an open source project to build a quadcopter where you can attach a camera to. This is really a nice combination of tasks. I get to build something, can mess around in the code (unlike other interesting projects these days (Google Android, WowWee robotics, etc) it’s not written in Java), get something to play around with (boys need toys) and can finally do something photography related. Well, this project is months away for me due the other stuff, but hey, maybe in summer.

Well, so much for a quick roundup of the major productive stuff I’m planning to spend time on. More details when there’s progress and/or something to write.