Context failure: linking to Ryan Tomayko's article without linking to the article that's brought it to people's attention again, namely Josh Peek's 'Gem Packaging: Best Practices'.

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/9/1/gem-packaging-best-pr...

Giles Bowkett has also written about the related issue of screwing up the load path:

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/unshiftfiledirnamef...

It's also worth noting that Ruby 1.9 requires rubygems automatically, as it's included in the standard library.