The solution that I use is to use the unix "at" command to launch the process. This is very simple to do, and if your cron is configured properly any messages printed by the job will be sent to you in an email (assisting greatly in debugging). A draw-back, though, is that this is inappropriate for long-running processes. For those I tend to use a cron that tries to restart the process, and then check at startup to see if it is running. (Usually by trying to grab a file lock.)

For a poor man's parallel process control you can modify this by specifying a random queue to send the job to. OK, pretty poor, but it is surprising how far this one goes.