About features of LinkedIn…
Sometimes people ask me to join their groups. Unfortunately, I can’t. I can’t join group for a couple of years. And here is why:
“Hi Frances,
many months ago I exceeded the number of groups I could join. It even seems to me that in early times people could join more groups than these days. This means that to try to join one more group I need to leave several groups.
This experiment (leaving group by group until I could join a group) is very odd to me. Sorry, Frances. Linkedin should say sorry, of course, but these guys do strange things instead of things that people need (extended group membership, for example).
What is the idea to allow people set pluses on other people’s skills? I had a number of pluses set on those skills I never had. What is the meaning of this feature? I have five pluses set on Jira (the service I never used), seven pluses on Oracle (the last time I used Oracle was in 2004).
I think that our (ordinary users’) common task is to press this team (Linkedin’s) to make the service more meaningful to us.
Alex”
A minor LinkedIn bug
Case-sensitive or case-insensitive are LinkedIn skills? The question seems odd. However, yesterday I faced constant red flag of a user-added skill. A colleague of mine marked my skill, let’s call it hereafter ‘myskill’. I glanced at the red flag and expected it to disappear. The flag disappears, unless I open another browser page with LinkedIn, or browser, or device.
The red flag remained red for several hours.
I started thinking that there is something wrong (not that I think too slowly. Maybe slowly, okay. I created a blog post based, as usual, on a real app, and found a couple of bugs in my framework. And after all this the flag was still red). I found ‘myskill’ in my skills. There were no counter, strangely. I tried to delete and re-create it.
After several experiments, I finally got that I have ‘MySkill’ that is not marked, ‘myskill’ that is marked by colleague and the flag.
After deleting ‘MySkill’, the red flag has gone, eventually.
A LinkedIn user’s manifesto
Today, I wanted again to endorse a person’s skills. Again, I failed miserably: if you are not connected to a person, no skills can be endorsed. Id est, there are no skilled people outside your network? Or a person can’t be skilled if he/she is not a friend of you? A book, you have just read and enjoyed, it’s not yet a reason to set a plus to the author’s skills, only ‘connected authors’ are skillful.
We users, who else, should say that LinkedIn has flaws in the network logic. I sent the following letter:
Hello,
I have 495 connections and LinkedIn says that the limit of invitations is applied. Okay, could you DECREASE the limit to 2900 invitations (instead of 3000 that every LinkedIn user is born with)?
It seems to me that some restrictions of LinkedIn are not well set up. For example, I want to check people’s skills, those who
– wrote free open-source products or frameworks that I use with pleasure
– wrote great technical books that I enjoyed
– share cutting-edge technical information via blogging, twittering, etc
Isn’t it strange that I should be in contact personally with the author of a book or a framework to clearly show to others that I admire his/her skills?
Is a book or a framework a bit worse if I’m not acquainted with the author?
This restriction is merely nonsense. Are you afraid of the possibility that I’ll be marking every and each’s skills? I could mark all my connections, had I wanted so.
Another point of view is about the point where people obtain technical information. My connections share blog posts, tweets, re-tweets, interesting pages. By limiting me (or a user of yours), what the purpose you are going to achieve? To force people collect and absorb information outside LinkedIn?
Well, protecting from salesmen and similar folks is a necessity. I was asked by three, or four, or even terrifying five people to buy a chair or a software product, or about some sponsoring. Excellent, without your security I could be asked for something ten of more times, thanks for your work.
Again, what’s about my limit? 495 connections is not the number that should prevent me from initiating new connections.
Alexander
Visitor counter. The story 2
How many visitors?
Hardly can two visitors be from four non-adjacent countries?
WordPress added visitor counter to blog statistics
The long-awaiting feature came to us: early we needed to use external map services not only to view visitors’ countries (it’s interesting, really), but also visitor counters as WordPress displayed only view counters.
Today I noticed that visitor counters are also seen in statistics:
There is nothing new in Summaries and the top view counter displays only views, however, this is a good little step to better usability, I believe.
Tip of the day: setting the size of browser’s window
Sometimes, you need to set a window to a particular size. Not a problem, in the one-liner below we start Firefox and set height and width:
Start-SeFirefox | ConvertTo-SeAutomationElement | Invoke-UIAWindowTransformResize -TransformResizeWidth 500 -TransformResizeHeight 200;
Tip of the day: using wildcards in UIAutomation
One of amazing features of PowerShell cmdlets is supporting so-called wildcards. What are wildcards? The characters that substitute one or more, or even all of the characters in the string.
For example, you need to simplify your code:Start-Process calc -PassThru | Get-UIAWindow | Get-UIAButton -Name a* | Invoke-UIAButtonClick;This code presses the plus button, the button that is named Add.
Imagine that you need to press the Reciprocal button and you’ll immediately love wildcards.
Metro automation: getting started
After a long hiatus, yesterday, I suddenly thought that it’s the time to return to Metro automation. To my surprise, rumors have been already circulating that Windows 8 Next Preview is upcoming in hours. Intuition? Maybe. In time is in time.
Yesterday I added to UIAutomaitonSpy the functionality to run PowerShell scripts. Today I polished a bit (here is great volume of work to do).
Let’s start. I tested the following on Windows 8 CP x64 and Windows 8 RP x86 (Release Preview of June, 01st). The binaries was built on a Windows 8 CP x64 box.
C
1. download the package. It’s not the default release now.
2. Unpack the package to a certain directory. We need to put in a secure location. One of them is %SystemRoot%, the other is %ProgramFiles%. The latter is more appropriate. In my tests, I creates the “C:\Program Files\1” directory and put the binaries there. You have in the folder UIAutomationSpy.exe, the config, UIAutomation.dll and TMX.dll.
3. One more file you’ve got is a certificate. You need to install it. Alternatively, you can sign UIAutomationSpy.exe with the certificate you possibly have.
Otherwise, below are screenshots. Run certmgr, for example, from cmd.exe and follow the pictures:
After you installed the certificate and the application in the secure location (you might set the policy not to require this if you’d like to), you can run the application.
For the first test, just run the application, agree with UAC and manually run the Start screen by pressing the Win button. Now you should see something like on the picture below:
On the picture, UIAutomationSpy shows the code for the Mail tile. It is bordered with the red rectangle. All that I’d like to offer is to explore tiles:
This is a text box, Edit in terms of UIAutomation.
Tomorrow I’m planning to start discussing how to write and run scripts for Metro UI.
W8: if Task Manager had previews…
I just wondering why Task Manager is deprived of icon pop-ups that apllications in TaskBar have.
PowerShell In GUI Blog 
