basho/riak-chef-cookbook — pull request #22 by mitchellh (2012-03-16 21:07:20+00:00)
Title: Prepare VM arguments using the hash value of node.riak.erlang

Since Chef uses "Mashes" which aren't actually Hashes, some of the Riak
configuration turned to strings were "" objects.
By calling `to_hash` it turns it into a hash which is what the libraries
expect.