Working with blob on cassandra 2.0 CQL 3.1

[psachs]

When I try to INSERT data as blob the adapter fails due to an incompatibility which is described here:
http://www.datastax.com/documentation/cql/3.0/cql/cql_reference/blob_r.html

The method cast_to_cql in lib/cassandra-cql/statement.rb:112
the conversion ruby escape(obj.unpack('H*')[0]) produces a string containing a hex number. Cassandra 2.0 requires a hex number 0x... when inserting a blob.

The referenced method:

    def self.cast_to_cql(obj)
      if obj.kind_of?(Array)
        obj.map { |member| cast_to_cql(member) }
      elsif obj.kind_of?(Hash)
        obj
      elsif obj.kind_of?(Numeric)
        obj
      elsif obj.kind_of?(Date)
        obj.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
      elsif obj.kind_of?(Time)
        (obj.to_f * 1000).to_i
      elsif obj.kind_of?(SimpleUUID::UUID)
        obj
      elsif obj.kind_of?(TrueClass) or obj.kind_of?(FalseClass)
        obj
      # There are corner cases where this is an invalid assumption but they are extremely rare.
      # The alternative is to make the user pack the data on their own .. let's not do that until we have to
      elsif obj.kind_of?(String) and Utility.binary_data?(obj)
        escape(obj.unpack('H*')[0])
      else
        RUBY_VERSION >= "1.9" ? escape(obj.to_s.dup.force_encoding('ASCII-8BIT')) : escape(obj.to_s.dup)
      end
    end