I've written a little script that collects my external IP address every time I open a new terminal window and appends it, at well as the current time, to a text file. I'm looking for ideas on a way to visualize when/how often my IP address changes. I bounce between home and campus and could separate them using the script, but it would be nice to visualize them separately.
I frequently use matplotlib. Any ideas?
There's a section in the matplotlib user guide about drawing bars on a chart to represent ranges. I've never done that myself but it seems appropriate for what you're looking for.
Assuming you specified terminal, i'll assume you are on a UNIX variant system. Using the -f switch along with the command line utility tail can allow you to constantly monitor the end of a file. You could also use something like IBM's inotify, which can monitor file changes or dnotify (and place the file in it's own directory) which usually comes standard on most distributions (you can then call tail -n 1 to get the last line). Once the line changes, you can grab the current system time since epoch using Python's time.time() and subtract it from the time of the last change, then plot this difference using matplotlib. I assume you could categorize the times into ranges to make the graphing easier on yourself. 1 Bar for less than 1 hour change intervals, another for changes between 1 - 5 hours, and so on.
There is a Python implementation of tail -f located here if you don't want to use it directly. Upon a detection of a change in the file, you could perform the above.
"When" is one dimensional temporal data, which is well shown by a timeline. At larger timescales, you'd probably lose the details, but most any plot of "when" would have this defect.
For "How often", a standard 2d (bar) plot of time vs frequency, divided into buckets for each day/week/month, would be a standard way to go. A moving average might also be informational.
You could combine the timeline & bar plot, with the timeline visible when you're zoomed in & the frequency display when zoomed out.
How about a bar plot with time on the horizontal axis where the width of each bar is the length of time your computer held a particular IP address and the height of each bar is inversely proportional to the width? That would also give a plot of when vs how often plot.
You could also interpret the data as a pulse density modulated signal, like what you get on a SuperAudio CD. You could graph this or even listen to the data. As there's no obvious time length for an IP change event, the length of a pulse would be a tunable parameter. Along similar lines, you could view the data as a square wave (triangular wave, sawtooth &c), where each IP change event is a level transition. Sounds like a fun Pure Data project.
Plot your IP as a point on the xkcd internet map (or some zoomed in subset of the map, to better show different but closely neighboring IPs).
Plot each point "stacked" proportional to how often you've had that IP, and color the IPs to make more recent points brighter, less recent points proportionally darker.