I have spent a few hours setting up, running and then digging into the riak ruby client, this was based on message posted by @seancribbs inviting people to assist in debugging some issues he was having with "intermittent failure around the generated node not starting".
On investigation of the issues, and a read over the code in general I came across a couple of things I would fix first.
In both of the following instances I would rewrite the process management code which executes riak and riak-admin tools. Currently it is not consistent in it's checking response codes or error output, this in my view is bad.