Blocking socket IO and wxRuby

I have just found out (after spending lots of time trying to figure out
why my wxruby app is always hanging) that blocking on socket IO is the
reason.

I have seen the tutorial at
http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?Sockets after following a link
in a lang.ruby.wxruby.user post. Is there a simpler way to approach
this?

Thanks,

Martin