Most init.d start-up scripts seem to be bash scripts, but you can write them with any language. Here's some template code I use to create my own Linux services. You can even add them to chkconfig to be started properly on startup, and they'll also work with RedHat / CentOS's service system straight off.

Eric Hodel has looked at a new feature provided by Ruby 1.8.5 called Process::setrlimit. It makes it easy to limit the memory usage of your Ruby processes.. ideal if you're experiencing memory leaks! Eric shows an example that's as simple as adding this to your application's environment.rb file:

This month's "Troll of the Month" is Ruby vs Python - why no-one should care by Cynos. Cynos touches on a point I've seen raised a few times in the past month.. namely that Python and Ruby are similar and are, supposedly, 'converging'. He argues, therefore, that both communities should stop evangelizing to each other. Despite a reasonable, if baited, argument, however, the comments quickly turn into a pointless flamewar:

The Rails Forum has announced a Rails Tutorial contest:

acts_as_cached is a plugin by Chris Wanstrath, Tim Myrtle, and PJ Hyett that simply allows you to cache any Ruby object in memory (using memcached). Check out the documentation for the full instructions, but if you've got a working memcached server ready and waiting, it's as easy as installing a gem (memcached-client), a plugin (acts_as_cached), and adding 'acts_as_cached' to your model.