Existing library which does the same thing, and faster, with arbitrary polynomials: http://code.google.com/p/crcutil/
crcutil also has many fatal flaws for inclusion in other projects: the code is horrifically ugly, it's hosted on google code so it looks unmaintained and abandoned, it's C++, it uses unreadable ASM to be "fast" but that's not portable across all the architectures Redis runs on, and it has a horrible build system (because of ASM and C++ and other issues).
I guess if your project doesn't want to include C++ (and you don't want to write a simple C wrapper), you've got a fair point. But it sounds like their implementation is significantly faster than the one in the linked post.