Re: [Camino] print history

On Feb 19, 2008 1:09 PM, Matthew Metzger <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm the system administrator for a school. Quite frequently, I get a
> request from a staff person to look at a student's browsing history.

Before answering the technical question, let me ask the obligatory
mailing list question: "What are you really trying to accomplish"? If
the request is intended in to look for any kind of inappropriate
usage, then no answer we can give will actually help; it's trivial to
delete history entries from within Camino, and we don't make any
attempt to keep an audit-able or tamper-proof record. If that's the
intent, then what you'd really need to do is something server-side
(e.g., use proxies, and log information about requests there by the
requesting machine).

However, if you are looking for information that there is no
expectation that students would want to hide (looking at how students
do research on the internet, or something of that nature):

> Is there an easy way to get a report of the history in plain text or
> pdf. The "Print" option under File is not able to be selected when
> viewing the history.

The history file is in the notoriously painful Mork format (which
we'll move away from once we have time). However, someone wrote a tool
to extract useful text from it, which is available at:
http://www.jwz.org/hacks/mork.pl
If you run it on ~/Library/Application\ Support/Camino/history.dat
you'll get most of the raw data you are looking for (especially if you
use -vv).

-Stuart