@mferrier Every time I read "nanocopters" I'm then disappointed to see they're visible to the naked eye.
RubyGems does some magic with require so you can load gems as though they were regular Ruby libraries. There’s some weirdness, though:
irb(main):001:0> require 'syntaxi'
=> false
irb(main):002:0> Syntaxi
=> Syntaxi
irb(main):003:0> Gem::RubyGemsVersion
=> "0.8.11"require returned false even though it actually loaded the gem. Of course, I didn’t realize it was loaded, naïvely believing require knew what it was talking about. require_gem "syntaxi" worked, why not this? After some mucking around in rubygems/custom_require.rb, I decided it was at least partly working: Gem::GemPathSearcher#find worked, as did Gem.activate. The only thing left in the overridden require was require__, which is the original Kernel#require.
That’s when I found an email on the rubygems-developers list explaining things. Everything’s fine, ignore that false, move along.
previously: Strip Whitespace