title: Make UUID shorter (Hex to ASCII conversion)
body: <p>In my web application one model uses identifier that was generated by some UUID tool. As I want that identifier to be part of the URL I am investigating methods to shorten that UUID string. As it is currently is in hexadecimal format I thought about converting it to ASCII somehow. As it should afterwards only contain normal characters and number ([\d\w]+) the normal hex to ASCII conversion doesn't seem to work (ugly characters).
  Do you know of some nice algorithm or tool (Ruby) to do that?</p>