Vladimir and Unicode
My colleague Vladimir has a long and elaborate post about missing Unicode support in Ruby and RoR. I totally agree that any decent language needs to support Unicode natively, and I can only hope it will not take Ruby too long to get there.
My favorite links on Unicode in general: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!), by Joel Spolsky, On the goodness of Unicode and of course Unicode and Ruby (both by Tim Bray).