How to export Google Chrome History to MS Excel

Google does a good job  of keeping tracking of your history of the web sites you have visited. There are add on's that allow for a enhanced version of history. But what if you want to do some of your own analysis or need to search and sort stuff you do want the data in excel.

Here are some quick pointers. 

Google Chrome keeps your History in a relational database. It uses SqlLite a lightweight database engine. It is used by Google,Firefox and on many mobile devices. You can find the table structure of the history database and and an analysis over here

I did try to setup an ODBC driver and access the tables through excel but could not get excel to read the data.
There are tools like sqllitebrowser. but I found the  FireFox Plugin sqlitemanager works very well.
Most of the date time fields are stored in the UTC use Jan 1 1600 as the epoch date or zero time. i.e the number that you will get is the microseconds from Jan 1 1600. If you want to convert it excel time (Jan 1 1900) you can add the following calculation in the sql statement on the field.
fieldName/(8.64*10e9) - 109205. Found this formula courtesy of this site.

• (8.64*10^9) is the number of microseconds in a day.
• 109205 is the number of days, including leap days, between 1601 and 1900. 

Do note that this formula is for GMT and does not compensate for Daylight savings Time.
to calculate to your timezone you need to change the second variable
For timezones ahead of GMT
109205 - (Time Diff with GMT/24)

For timezones behind GMT
109205 +  (Time Diff with GMT/24)
So for India (GMT +5.5) it will be
109205- 5.5/24
For a GMT -1 timezone it will be
109205 + 1/24

The Google App Inventor - Visual Basic of the Mobile Phone market?

Saw the video of Google App Inventor. Seems very promising. he buzz about Google Android is very high at least in the developer community. At the Bangalore Barcamp Android was very high. While iPhone was acknowledged as a platform to know almost everybody was bullish about Android. And no the event was not sponsored by Google.
While the official blog seems to be indicate that they are targeting it to the Education market I do think the market will be bigger than that. looking at the video it seems to remind me and a few others of Visual Basic.
While Visual Basic was mocked around as a toy language it was a huge factor in getting Microsoft Developer mind share in the 1990's.  It hid the monstrous Windows API from you and allowed you to put together applications rapidly. More importantly it allowed programmers to get productive very quickly.
I can go on talking about Visual basic as I spent quite few years of my career on it but that's another story.
What is exciting is that App Inventor can unleash a whole new set of programmers onto the Android platform and give Google the same edge that Microsoft had in the nineties. The availability of an army of developers combined with a vibrant market for third party components (VBX, Activex,...)  simply destroyed the market leader (Powerbuilder) and a host of other competitors (Uniface,GuptaSQL, Delphi,Developer2000) simply fell by the wayside.
True the dynamics and usage patterns of the mobile market are different from the PC market and the client server era but some of the fundamentals still remain the same. Platforms that have a huge developer base will have a huge market edge. With a lot of the handset makers  moving to Android and with 200,00 activations per day Google definitely seems to have made the right moves. And while I am reading the tea leaves Hello Android book is No 2 in the Software Development list at Amazon.
So will App Inventor live up to it's hype? Watch this space as I wait impatiently for access to the Platform.

Unacceptable Content

So I got a rejection letter from Google Adsense. Not worried so much about the rejection but more irritated by the response . Searching the web I found that this is par for course and there a lot of people get a letter like this.
For a company that prides itself in making information easily available it is strange at the total lack of information for the rejection. Seems to me the purpose of the letter is to be necessarily vague so that they don't get sued.
How on earth dose anyone know what policy they  have violated? And as the blog  be at least 6 months old in many Asian countries but there is no 'official' list.
And of course writing this blog post may be deemed 'Unacceptable Content' so I may never get onto Adsense :)

Cloud and the small Business

This article at forbes addresses how small businesses are rapidly embracing cloud and what are the potential success factors needed to address the small business space. All the major players are making products in this space. As pointed out in the article the Cloud does enable the small Business segment to buy and consume services without the pain of buying, setting up and maintaining hardware infrastructure and software products.  

In my opinion selling applications to the small businesses could be  the Long Tail of the Cloud. For those not familiar the Long Tail by Chris Anderson talks about how the internet enabled businesses like Amazon to cater to niche audiences that were not served by big retailers due to the low volume of business. I do not believe that there will be vendor loyalty and the businesses will cherry pick the services from multiple vendors.
Vendors like Zoho are aggressively targeting this space with services in the $10-$12. I do believe that there will be a market for custom applications as well. Maybe not for an individual business but for a cluster of businesses. CustomerSquare run by a friend of mine is targeting specific verticals in the retail space. The cloud   reduces the risk significantly for the small business provider . He pays per month , if it doesn't suit him he can dump it with a second thought. He will not be stuck with a boxed piece of software that lies unused. For the vendor also there is an increasing opportunity to upsell services , add small incremental features ,test market them and get additional revenue. He get's instant feedback and can drop things that don't work out well. No more long product cycles and no more upgrade battles.