get_recent_tweets.rb

require "rubygems"
require 'mechanize'
 
agent = WWW::Mechanize.new
response = agent.get("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/samuraicoder.xml")
xml = response.content
doc = Nokogiri::XML(xml)
doc.search("text").each do |text|
  p text.inner_html
end

get_recent_tweets_with_json.rb

require "rubygems"
require 'mechanize'
require 'active_support'
agent = WWW::Mechanize.new
response = agent.get("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/samuraicoder.json")
json = response.body
tweets = []
ActiveSupport::JSON::decode(json).each do |hash|
   tweets << hash["text"]
end

p tweets