maroon,
I'm not using $hash but am using $sha384 and trimming the first 8 chars. I read elsewhere about the birthday problem (though not in as great detail as you provided) and that doing it the way I am now should solve it. But, you seem far more knowledgeable on the subject that the page I got that info from. What are your thought on what I'm doing currently?
Also, there's plenty of ram so no worries there but I'm always interested in execution speed gains, even if the function(s) are a little more complex. That being the case, I'd like to play with your &binvar idea and see what the result is. I'm new to this stuff though so hopefully I can follow along the harder it gets. Thanks for sharing your knowledge! It really helps when trying to understand all this.
