PacketGarden
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
PacketGarden logs all of the activities one might do on a networked computer—Web surfing, file transfers, email, IM, games and P2P—and uses the accumulation to “grow” a personal 3D garden. The open-source tool monitors packets on designated ports, each with a different virtual plant to represent it. Uploads and downloads change the topology of the landscape. To quote the creator, “You can think of packet gardens as pages from a network diary.”
by Kevin Makice
A Ph.D student in informatics at Indiana University, Kevin is rich in spirit. He wrestles and reads with his kids, does a hilarious Christian Slater imitation and lights up his wife's days. He thinks deeply about many things, including but not limited to basketball, politics, microblogging, parenting, online communities, complex systems and design theory. He didn't, however, think up this profile.
Tyler Who Doesn’t Blog passed this info along to me. I’m not a BitTorrent user, nor do I have much experience with peer2peer tools—outside of a little dabbling with 6S ("New search hurdles are not technical")—but I do know an interesting visualization idea when I read about one.
PacketGarden logs all of the activities one might do on a networked computer—Web surfing, file transfers, email, IM, games and P2P—and uses the accumulation to “grow” a personal 3D garden. The open-source tool monitors packets on designated ports, each with a different virtual plant to represent it. Uploads and downloads change the topology of the landscape.
To quote the creator, “You can think of packet gardens as pages from a network diary.”
Not every computer can run it, but my world-worn MacBook seems to be up to it. I’ll plant the seeds of activity soon and post pictures of my garden in a few weeks.
2 Comments
Does this open the realm to “green thumb” attacks where a bot/person/program can spy on your garden and reverse engineer the type and amount of content downloaded?
Perhaps to counter the net-garden pests, we could use RAID.