After many years of using other people’s tools to make data visualization art, I finally wrote my own. You can find it here for download:

http://sintixerr.wordpress.com/pkviz-packet-visualizer-and-animator/

It’s called pkviz and it is primarily intended to take network traffic and puts it in a form humans find easy to play with to find unusual patterns and anomalies. It helps them do better analysis.

In action, it looks like this:

What I find interesting, though, is that there is an overlap between what is useful about line, shape, form color, etc and what people find aesthetically pleasing. So, instead of just using it for analysis, I make art. Like this: