Simon Stapleton wrote:
> I knocked together a little C extension today with the help of the  guys
> on the ruby-lang irc channel, it uses the libuuid stuff  generally
> available on unix boxes to generate uuids.  If anyone is  interested,
> it's available at http://www.tufty.ath.cx/~simon/ uuid_generator-0.1.tar.gz

I went through this exercise myself a while back, and then discovered
that DCE-style UUIDs are called GUIDs in Windows (Microsoft having
independently implemented DCE), and there's a pure Ruby implementation
available:

http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby-guid/

Steve