Found this awesome post explaining external calls with ruby: [mentalized.net](http://mentalized.net/journal/2010/03/08/5_ways_to_run_commands_from_ruby/) My Dashing app kept hosing when calling python for some data. I was using result = exec(“python getTicketCount.py”) which REPLACES current process… result = `python getTicketCount.py` worked like a champ