Processing (processing.org) is such a great tool, I decided to spend some time learning about it during the holidays. Here's what I came up with:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4ehmI2YVdQ
The globe you see in the video is rendered in real-time, with a script polling a webserver via a PHP script which simply runs 'netstat | grep ":80" | grep "ESTABLISHED"' and returns whatever comes out. In other words, it returns a list of active HTTP connections to that specific web server.
After gathering a list of IPs, I find their geographic coordinates via Maxmind's GeoLiteCity database (it's free and pretty good :). Finally, I plot each connection as a line which fades as it goes further. This fading is important, because it allows to distinguish locations with more connections from the rest.
This was inspired by a very similar visualization which Google has in a big screen at the GooglePlex, but I couldn't find a video of it.
Comments and other visualizations are much appreciated.
