RE daemonizing, Ruby 1.9 does have a nice Process.daemon function (this is what the author is hoping for?). I'm also a big fan of the 1.9-introduced spawn() function. Not only does this make it easy to create background processes, but via its :in, :out, and :err options (also now found in system() and exec()) it's pretty easy to pipe one spawned process's output to another.

OTOH, I'm a big fan of the What's New in Python X.X articles. Nice features like spawn() seem to sneak into the Ruby codebase unheralded and practically unnoticed.