YJL

It’d been a very long time that I wanted to paint IPv4 addresses that my computer has communicated with into a grid in terminal. Each cell represents a block of IPv4 addresses.

Animated GIF by hours, You can watch video on YouTube.

The purpose, if any, is to have cells painted as many as possible. Just try to see how many blocks that my computer has contacted in normal usage. Each block or cell is about $256^4/(29*106)=1397191$ IP addresses. As long as at least one IP from a cell, then the cell is painted.

You can find my scripts on Gist. The scripts are not really made for anything but just to collect the data.

I don’t know exactly why I wanted to do this, but it had been in my mind in many years until now. If I had to guess, I think it had something to do with Defrag utility of MS-DOS. For some bizarre reason, I was fascinated by the progress window.

I finally wrote a simple code using netstat to collect the addresses in 60-second interval. In order to have many painted, I regularly added a Linux distribution BitTorrent download, so there would be new remote addresses. I could have fun and help the Linux spread. Interestingly, the one I wanted to help most isn’t have official torrent, Gentoo Linux.

Anyway, the result is here, a simplified animated GIF above and a more detailed clip on YouTube, frame by frame, minute by minute. Finally, I could put this to rest.