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How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

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Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

#91

Post by cheepin »

forca wrote: post #55
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try my best to break people of that awful habit. I also find that I'm usually happy enough dealing only with people who can manage to open a pdf (or any other non-proprietary format).

Yes. I hate receiving documents in .docx or any other proprietary format, especially if I have not agreed to that format prior to receiving them. I like plain text if at all possible. I'll happily receive PDFs because I can view them under Linux/BSD, but others piss me off. People THINK MS Word is the de facto business standard. It isn't. Text and PDF are the standards. Never had issues with either. I had a friend te…

>locked down to prevent recruiters and others from changing it to something other than the original

Can you elaborate? Why would they want to change your CV?

Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

#92

Post by sqrt17 »

6stringmerc wrote: post #50
character0 wrote: post #6

The creation story for this is really neat. This could be an amazing tool in the school setting, especially for people that teach in university writing centers. This isn't just asking an author for a peek behind the curtain, asking a few questions about what they were thinking at the time of writing, this is Breaking the Magician's Code level stuff! I am curious to see who is (brave enough?) to show their writing pro…

I'd be happy to upload scans of one of my more recent short stories, "Pink Paint Rain," simply to show how much true effort goes into massaging lines and language a la code. Finished version: http://www.scribd.com/doc/156040925/Pink-Paint-Rain-Vernon-W... I have about 7-10 print outs of the story with mark ups. Before switching to English & Creative Writing I was in Computer Science and pretty skilled with C++ at the…

Hi, I'm a computational linguist and I would find it really great if some people could share their traces of their typing/editing process.

In programming, we have editors that have strong support for writing because we know exactly what the semantics of code is, and what good operations for editing/refactoring are. With writing prose, the best we currently have is edit histories from wikipedia articles, which are on a much larger timescale and full of things that should not be part of the editing process (vandalism, NPOV wars, etc.)

Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

#94

Post by lmm »

6stringmerc wrote: post #52
sunir wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could "Keep Calm and File > Make a copy..." of the Google Doc and share that instead of the original draft. The copy doesn't copy the version history.

This is personal experience, so I'm not trying to be intentionally glib. Maybe for one person. For distributing to two to five people, this is a terrible idea, because here's how Mr. Murphy rolls: As soon as you get edits from A, B, and C of the team back, and update the document and are ready to distribute another version, the last person Y will submit their content. Person Y's content edits something that Person B…

Honestly the only way I've found to make this stuff work is to use something like LaTeX, where the source is a text-based format, and then put it in a real version control system like git, that has proper support for merging and resolving conflicts. Then when the document is correct you compile it to a PDF, and that's what you actually send out (bonus: much smaller file size than something like word).

(Of course, the big downside is that all your collaborators have to know LaTeX, and not use funny macros that the others don't understand)

Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

#95

Post by lmm »

cheepin wrote: post #91
forca wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I hate receiving documents in .docx or any other proprietary format, especially if I have not agreed to that format prior to receiving them. I like plain text if at all possible. I'll happily receive PDFs because I can view them under Linux/BSD, but others piss me off. People THINK MS Word is the de facto business standard. It isn't. Text and PDF are the standards. Never had issues with either. I had a friend te…

>locked down to prevent recruiters and others from changing it to something other than the original Can you elaborate? Why would they want to change your CV?

Unscrupulous recruiters will sometimes add extra skills or bulk up your experience.

Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

#96

Post by leni536 »

lambda wrote: post #87
r00fus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much sensitive information is inadvertently pasted into a browser location bar or autofill text box that's silently captured by web apps like Google Docs? I know I've accidentally done the "paste password" into those places accidentally at times.

I believe (can't recall the source at the moment) that on Google computers, they actually watch all of your input for password input, and if you enter your password somewhere other than the official Google single-sign on interface, will make you rotate your password. They're pretty serious about not letting you type your password anywhere other than where you're supposed to.

This seems really unlikely. Do they really calculate hashes for all words in a google document? What if your password is a sentence? Do they calculate hashes for all the fields in a spreadsheet too?

Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

#97

Post by e12e »

r00fus wrote: post #35
michaelx386 wrote: post #26

I broke out in to a cold sweat watching this as I remembered all the times I've inadvertently pasted sensitive stuff in to a document. It's still very cool though, I'll just need to remember to be careful when sharing documents.

I wonder how much sensitive information is inadvertently pasted into a browser location bar or autofill text box that's silently captured by web apps like Google Docs? I know I've accidentally done the "paste password" into those places accidentally at times.

> I wonder how much sensitive information is inadvertently pasted into a browser location bar or autofill text box that's silently captured by web apps like Google Docs?

Well, if you paste something in the location bar, presumably it'll already be on it's way to google (or whichever service handle autocompletion/suggestion)...

Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

#98

Post by e12e »

hunter2_ wrote: post #81
r00fus wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it me or is your userid ironically apropos to this discussion?

Heh, throwaway. Posting an admission that I might've shared my passwords, using the username associated with those passwords, seemed foolish.

For those not familiar:

http://www.bash.org/?244321

Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

#99

Post by e12e »

bostonpete wrote: post #31
sbarre wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also take advantage of all the great bonuses of revisions and then before sending the document just copy/paste the content into a new document that doesn't include the revisions. That seems sensible too.

I'm pretty sure you can just "Accept all changes" before saving the document too and the change history will be cleared.

Does sound like a very fragile workflow (there's no reasonable way to tell a full-history doc from a "publish grade" doc by glancing at the file on the filesystem.

Keeping everything in proper version control (possibly unzipped, to give usable diffs even for office document formats -- or in something like markdown) -- would at least rise the bar a bit -- there'd be different process for sending a single version of a file, and sending all versions of (all) [a] file(s).

I suppose if you're already running an internal mail server, you could just do filtering there, making sure no version/history-rich documents pass out that way...

Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

#100

Post by e12e »

fillskills wrote: post #65
brk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's a practiced habit. I found that when I first started writing regularly I would spend a lot of time doing constant editing similar to the example shown in the linked article. This would become distracting and time consuming, then I'd forget other things I had wanted to say. So I found it better, for me, to just kind of write things in my head first and then sit down and write -almost more transcribing vs. "w…

Thanks, thats really helpful for me. I am just starting to learn to write blog articles for my business and I certainly do a LOT of editing. Glad to see someone progress to where I want to be at... one day

If you haven't [read it] already, I strongly recommend "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser.

[edit: unintentionally demonstrating the need for more than one revision...]

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