_why announces a release of a new UTF-8 library (which adds UTF-8 support to Ruby, without using KCODE) by Nikolai Weibull. _why has also packaged it up (unofficially) into a gem to make it even easier to install (not all of us use git). Here's some demonstration code:

require 'encoding/character/utf-8'
str = u"hëllö"
str.length
  #=> 5
str.reverse.length
  #=> 5
str[/ël/]
  #=> "ël"