As Bill put it “possibly not a million dollar project but…”. He’d had an idea. Like all ideas, it was spawned by necessity.
A few weeks ago, I posted about creating a million dollar project going. I’m terribly at ideas, so I have been working on engaging my brain. However, I get a call today from Bill. This is where necessity is the mother of all creations. He was working away, when suddenly his outlook refused to connect to their exchange server, and had taken the rest of his office off too. The weird thing was the internet was still working. Did they have a downed exchange server? Nope… silly routing issues.
So what was Bill’s idea? An application that plots and displays the internet, and its health. While I do know there are a number of projects floating around at the moment that give a basic summary of the internet, Bill was after something more geographic. It’s all well and good showing that the backbone link between ISP 1 and ISP 2 is having a latency issue. But if ISP 2 is in Brazil, and you’re not touching it for your every day traffic, it shouldn’t (generally speaking) affect your browsing.
So Bill wants a map of the US, and possibly the world at a later point in time, that shows ISP statistics, and geographic locations. This might be a toughy, but not entirely impossible. I think it’d be a fairly simple case of gathering a handful of common sites, and running traces. This would allow you to plot a map with times.
This should be an interesting project. Thanks Bill.