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:<p>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4ehmI2YVdQ<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Comments and other visualizations are much appreciated.
Very cool. I'm a big fan of Processing, it makes doing simple graphical stuff with programming pretty easy. Just out of curiousity, what platform did you do that on? Did you have to use an external OpenGL library or some other 3D rendering outside of Processing's core?