Mms proposed updates

These are my proposed updates, mostly reflecting the things that I've been doing without documenting them. Feel free to tear them apart. I'll annotate changes that I think need explanation.
The rationale is that patch-level changes are not supposed to contain behavior or API changes; they are reserved for bug fixes, additions and security updates. I think there is security value in making it trivially easy to update to latest patch versions, at least for gems that obey [semantic versioning](http://semver.org/).