There does not appear to be a nice way to get a current users real name in ruby. The best way I have found on *nix systems (Not windows) is:

%x{finger `whoami`}.match(/Name: ([\w ]*)/)
real_username = $1

There are other ways including parsing the git profile if it exists. At some point I will try to get these packaged up into a gem which can work its way through a list of possible sources.