To install the latest alpha release:

gem install xeroizer

Please feel free to try it out and provide feedback through github.

Xeroizer has now been updated to support the Xero API V2.06 including:

• Manual journal create/update/view (can only create draft invoices for now)
• Inventory items create/update/view
• Invoice line items can now be specified with the item_code which uses defaults for the item from Xero
• PDF versions of invoices and credit notes can be retrieved with the Invoice#pdf([filename]) method
• Payments can now have a reference specified on creation.

As always, remember this library is still only alpha-quality, so please make sure to test, test, test.

Of great interest to me is the ability to download PDF invoices directly from Xero which are formatted according to the chosen branding theme. This functionality will greatly decrease the time to market of my new application (still in stealth) by a few weeks and has me very excited.

My ruby library (Xeroizer) will be updated to work with these new features within the next week or so. Keep a watch on the project to keep up-to-date as changes are made and feel free to submit pull-requests for desired functionality. I usually respond within 24 hours.

For this task I was presented with a three-page spread of stimulus material and in two hours I had to write a 600 word document in almost any form. In this stimulus material I saw some sporting activities and some comments on tribal societies (if I ever set up my scanner I may add a copy of this stimulus material here in the future).

During school I was always the math and computer guy and writing was definitely not my strong suit. However, I feel I managed to put together a fairly decent argumentative magazine article on the topic of sport and it's relevance in today's society in this pressure-packed two hours of exam fun! It's a topic I still mostly believe in, although I intentionally made this article inflammatory to attempt to polarise and entertain the marker enough so that they may overlook the odd grammatical or spelling error.

So, without further ado, I give you the two-hour ramblings of a 17 year old some 12 years ago (with all original spelling and grammatical errors included as faithfully as possible, although I hope I made some more corrections when transcribing the final version). Oh I wish I got to come back to this a couple of days later an edit it before handing it in however, I guess everyone was in the same situation.

Sport - what are we doing to our children? 

Sport, oh what an incredibly productive activity. From birth we teach our children that the only true heroes in our society are those who participate in sport. It is the sporting events that bring the crowds, sporting heroes who gain incredible amounts of money in sponsorship and children who are forced to believe that to be famous and well-liked they must be good at sport.

What is this fascination we have about sport? Most people argue that we participate in these activities to stay fit and healthy. This is a long way from the truth. Take Gridiron for example. This game consists of very big, heavily padded men who run around a field for three hours (remembering this is a sixty minute game) tackling other men. Is this what we call keeping fit? Is this really what we want to be teaching our children? Aparently so, as parents are usually the ones who push their children into playing these sports.

From birth, the male child is continuously pressed into participating in some for of team sport. This decision is usually made by the child's father and is usually in the form of a sport the father enjoys watching. The parents often take a more active roll in the game than the children themselves: screaming from the sidelines, arguing with the referees and generally pushing their children until they have nothing more to give. This ritual of making a child do something the parent wants them to do is very damaging for the child's developing personality. Rebellious behaviour only occurs because the children finally realise that they don't have to do everything their parents want them to do anymore. They gain control over their own life.

However, this is not where this cycle ends. The rebellious child turns into an adult and, after a few short years, they have a child. Because these new parents choose to forget the reasons for their rebellious stage, the cycle of pressuring their children into playing sport continues.

This ritual like behaviour of parents pressuring their children into believing sport is the only way to win their love stems from tribal times. Earlier in history men, predominately, were the group responsible for catching the meat. They had to be fit, just in order to survive so, they made sure their children were fit also. They made them participate in 'manly' activities to build muscle and fitness so some day they could be the hunters. As humans found less and less need for hunting our food, sport became a popular past-time. Instead of hunting, games were created to expel the extra energy no longer used in hunting and thus leisure-time sport was invented.

Now, in the present, even though we know it is based on stupid ideas, sport is more popular than it ever was before. Almost every weekend, parents all over the world are forcing their children to arise early to go off and participate in contact sports, that have the potential to cause permanent injuries. that affect a person for life [ed: wow… what a long and convoluted start of a paragraph]. These ideas can't possibly be what we want for our future leaders to have. Surely the cycle has to be broken sometime. Why can't that time be now? Sport is destroying the ability of our society to live in peace and harmony together by keeping the aggressive behaviour of tribal men alive in present day children. 

This library builds off the awesome work done by Tim Connor for the first & second API releases.

My version changes things up a bit by:

• adding Partner-application support
• making data-access more ActiveRecord-like (although definitely not feature-complete) 
• simplifying the definition (and redefinition as Xero continues to add to their API) of models to make keeping them up-to-date and testable easier.

I also plan on adding some features to the querying engine to make it easier to filter results whilst staying within the ruby language (and not having to drop into C#).

If you want to get started, check out the README or if you want to dive right into the code, head over to https://github.com/waynerobinson/xeroizer and clone a copy.

Note: This is an alpha-level version of the API. Feel free to increase functionality and test coverage and send me a GitHub pull-request for integration.

I made a decision a couple of weeks ago to unsubscribe from basically every one of these lists I very rarely read any of the messages and just delete them every time I receive them and I'm sick of my phone interrupting me during the day by pinging when it's just advertising material.

But there is so much of it. Years worth of accounts I have created on sites who now, in this economy, are sending marketing messages to me on time scales ranging from daily to weekly. Every day I have been unsubscribing to at least one 'newsletter' and it is usually higher than that.

Maybe I'm unusual, but having these types of marketing and even news messages mixed up with my real communication is annoying. Isn't this what RSS was created for? Why don't these companies provide RSS feeds for this information so people can keep their news items inside their news reader and allow them to keep there inboxes clear of clutter?

This idea is slowly permuatating  through the world of systems engineering with more and more systems administrators choosing to write and maintain scripts to keep their servers up-to-date, backed up and running efficiently. However, the above article reminded me that many other professions could benefit from their staff

1. knowing about the power of scripting/development
2. knowing how to write/use scripting languages
3. be allowed to automate their repetitive tasks by their employer

A quick search of the Internet doesn't reveal any courses targeted to non-technical employers/employees about an introduction to scripting & automating repetitive tasks. If I had the skills to develop training programs I would seriously consider developing something.

Of course, there also aren't any simple and affordable tools available to make this type of scripting accessible to your average non-programmer. Sure, every business machine has J/VBScript & VBA however, both these languages are pretty low-level when it comes to getting things done.

Any thoughts, training programs or tools available that I have missed out there?

Whilst this is a great primer on the differences between typefaces, I can't understand why they have chosen to use different font/background colours for the left and right panels on each comparison, not to mention the use of drop-shadow and/or engraving not only on the fonts, but using them differently on the left and right panels.

Maybe Douglas Bonneville is more designer than scientist, but if you want to make a comparison based on just one thing (in this case fonts), you should ensure that when showing side-by-side examples that they only vary by this one thing. Especially as all the 'negative' examples are shown using dark backgrounds and white fonts with drop-shadows. 

It's extremely sad, these trolls aren't the majority of his users. Nor does he 'work' for them. Many games take half-a-decade or more to develop and this one is only about 12 months old and only has a single developer. 

He really should stop posting about his personal life (and his new community manager should do a MUCH better job at managing the feedback). It is lame that he how now become a tall poppy (because he shows his sales stats in realtime on his website) and must be cut down by a few trolls who are jealous of his success.

Why am I defending him like this? I don't know. Empathy? Sympathy? I am envious of his success and I wish I had half his talent. I respect what he has done and, after the stress of doing start-ups *forever* I think I feel just as affronted by his trolls as I would if I was him. Sure, he's made > €400k in the last few days and he only had a couple of staff (who he probably pays almost nothing because they are extremely young and don't seem right for the company, IMHO) and he has almost no overheads that aren't personal, but I think he should be able to take a breath and celebrate that success, rather than needing to get back to the grindstone because, now he's got all this money, he is obligated to provide more content.

If I was him I would stop posting private blogs or tweets and I would remove the live updates on the sales stats. Both of them are just targets and don't serve any positive purpose anymore, professionally (making the company seem like a little single guy who's against the world and needs your support) or personally (now he's successful with over €2mil in revenues, but he's just one developer, he doesn't deserve *that* much money, that's just obscene, he should give it all back, hire dozens of people, or work 100 hour weeks).

Is it sad that he should stop? Of course it is. But people suck. Jealousy is human nature and people get angry when people have what they do not and often, don't believe deep down that they could ever have.

It's time for Notch to enjoy his success. I say, well done! Take a break. Enjoy life. You've earned it.

However, I was gladdened when I walked into my Borders today to find that they are now stocking Rhodia and Clairefontaine products. I have only ever been able to order these products online in Australia and now I get to go down and see the products in person before committing to purchase.