I bought Joe Armstrong's book a while back but put off a serious read for a while. A brief skim had put me off a little for mainly syntactical reasons, but in a "I'll need to sip this one slowly" rather than an "eewww" kind of way.

I've picked it back up recently with a vague idea of implementing a basic Atompub feed server, an effort I'll be documenting here, assuming I make progress. One thing that has been slightly frustrating so far is a decided lack of libraries. For example, neither Wikipedia nor Google produced any leads in the way of RFC 4122 UUID generation libraries.

Fortunately, I've implemented this kind of thing in a similarly library-poor environment so I decided to give it a go. The result is the very young uuid.erl, which is now hosted on Github. There's a very real chance I've made a mockery of Erlang's bit manipulation capabilities, so if you happen to be an Erlang wiz, please do take a look and let me know what can be improved. Also, I'd like to get around to implementing other UUID versions, but patches are more than welcome in the meantime.