Evolutionary Computing — my open-source journey (PDF)

Google Docs remains a pretty good hack. The City of Los Angeles is considering moving to it - I'll have to write about that at some point this week.

I'm not one for doing presentations with computer-generated slides, but I was fairly impressed with how easy it was to transfer an OO Impress slide show into Google Docs.

The last time I tried to do one of these, I couldn't get the projector to play well with X.

The problem I have with it, and any 'cloud' is, you may have written it, you may have copyrights to it, but if someone else controls your access to it, can it be said that you actually own it?

Great - the City of LA will not even _know_ where the "physical data" that's supposed to be theirs is going to be located after joining Google docs. Let alone will they know how to protect their data if they don't know _where_ it is. Apart from Google indexing all their 'classified' docs as well and making all kinds of nice offerings to people working for the municipality.

Or am I exaggerating? Sure hope I am, but I'm afraid I'm not.

I haven't looked fully at what the L.A. is doing, but I can't imagine Google Docs being robust enough in just about any way for something as complicated as a city government.

I'm still torqued by the lack of easily implemented paragraph indents in Docs. (I can do it with CSS, but to do anything "complicated" means hacking too much CSS for it to be worth it.)

Another thing I don't think is available in Google Docs is any kind of sophisticated versioning. But perhaps the city doesn't have that now and won't miss it ...

Quoting:I'm still torqued by the lack of easily implemented paragraph indents in Docs. (I can do it with CSS, but to do anything "complicated" means hacking too much CSS for it to be worth it.)

Can you elaborate or give some examples?

Quoting:Another thing I don't think is available in Google Docs is any kind of sophisticated versioning.

That's not just Google-specific. "Track Changes" in ODF is pretty inadequate. As is the similar feature in MS-Office/OOXML. What you'd really want is an integrated Git repository inside the ODF document, but because most vendors do not comply with the ODF spec about foreign objects and elements this is not possible to do just yet.

Quoting:I'm still torqued by the lack of easily implemented paragraph indents in Docs. (I can do it with CSS, but to do anything "complicated" means hacking too much CSS for it to be worth it.)

There's no formatting bar atop your document, like you would have in Word or OO Writer, with which you can set the paragraph indents.

You can hack into the CSS to indent so many pixels with each tag, but if you want to change that indent for subsequent portions of the new document, you need to write up more CSS, and that's just too hacky for pumping out a document.

As a result, if you want to do two returns between each paragraph (as is customary for most blogs and forums such as this one), you're good.

But if you want to do a traditional document with no spaces between paragraphs and an initial indent, it's just too hard. I don't know if the city of L.A. has checked with its employees as to whether or not they'd miss this basic word-processing feature (or the ability to change margins at all).