Over on the official Ruby news site, Urabe Shyouhei has announced the release of minor updates to both Ruby 1.8.6 and 1.8.7, namely 1.8.6p368 and 1.8.7p160:

It never ceases to surprise me how many good Ruby and Rails jobs there are around, despite the economic difficulties. Okay, most of those on our jobs board are New York or San Francisco focused, but.. we have telecommuting positions listed too! So if you're looking for a Ruby job you're in the right place (for now)! We've had several positions added to the Ruby jobs board over the last month:

Tekniqal.com is a site offering a series of 17 Basic Ruby tutorials in screencast form. In a way, it's like Railscasts, but focusing solely on basic Ruby techniques. So far there are 17 tutorials covering basic topics from whitespace and identifiers through to symbols and hashes, but it looks like there'll be more in future.

Redcar is a programmer's text editor for GNOME, written in Ruby and Vala (a curious C# like language for use with GNOME), by Daniel B Lucraft.

When it comes to developing large systems with many interdependent parts, it’s common nowadays to use “queues.” A queue is, for the most part, just a list that you can add items to and remove items from. Apps can use queues to despatch jobs / tasks to other apps or to shuttle logs and status information around.

If you've developed a Web application using Ruby lately, you've probably used Rack in one way or another. Rack calls itself a "Ruby Web server interface" and I tend to think of it as an abstraction between the messy world of HTTP and the potentially just as messy world of your code.

What's Hot on Github is a monthly(ish) post highlighting interesting GitHub-hosted Ruby-related projects that are new or updated within the past month.

Five months ago JetBrains (the company behind Java IDE IntellJ IDEA) released a "public preview" of RubyMine, a new Ruby and Rails IDE. Now, they've released the beta of version 1.0, the precursor for a final 1.0 launch later this month. You can download it right away - it came in at about a 75MB download for OS X, but Windows and Linux versions are also available.

It was just several months ago that we first began to mention MacRuby on Ruby Inside, but it's been coming on by leaps and bounds since then. MacRuby is a Mac OS X-based Ruby implementation that works on the Objective C runtime. It's based on Ruby 1.9 and uses the YARV VM (as Ruby 1.9 does) but will be switching to LLVM at the next major release. MacRuby is attempting to make Ruby a first class OS X development language.

The always popular MountainWest RubyConf took place again this year on March 13-14 and the always awesome Confreaks team was on hand to record all of the presentations. Already they have 31 videos of MWRC 2009 up and ready to view in both HD (720p) and 640x360 MPEG4 formats. This is a goldmine of viewing and even if you don't get to a single Ruby conference this year, these videos could do 90% of the work for you.

Twitter - the lifestreaming-meets-microblogging social site - has exploded in the last year and lots of applications have been developed that can take advantage of Twitter accounts. The downside is that many have required users to put their own Twitter username and password credentials into the third party apps.. a security minefield!