[Camino] print history

[Matthew Metzger]

Stuart Morgan wrote:
> On Feb 19, 2008 1:09 PM, Matthew Metzger <news at metzger.cc> 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

Hello Stuart,

thanks so much for the quick response!

You are absolutely right about the "What are you trying to accomplish?" 
question. I know the situation full well, but our Dean of Student Life 
is always asking for a browser history, even when I've explained 
multiple times that it isn't an accurate report.

The perl mork tool is exactly the type of thing that I was looking for 
to make giving such a report easier. I'll do some experimenting with it.

thanks again for your time and the helpful response.

-Matthew