Ping, but with a graph

Created/tested with Python 3.4 and 2.7.

pip3 install pinggraph

Tested on Windows and Ubuntu, should run on OS X as well. After installation just run:

gping [yourhost]

If you don't give a host then it pings google.

My apartments internet is all 4g, and while it's normally pretty fast it can be a bit flakey. I often found myself running ping -t google.com in a command window to get a rough idea of the network speed, and I thought a graph would be a great way to visualize the data. I still wanted to just use the command line though, so I decided to try and write a cross platform one that I could use. And here we are.

For a quick hack the code started off really nice, but after I decided pretty colors were a good addition it quickly got rather complicated. Inside pinger.py is a function plot(), this uses a canvas-like object to "draw" things like lines and boxes to the screen. I found on Windows that changing the colors is slow and caused the screen to flicker, so theres a big mess of a function called process_colors to try and optimize that. Don't ask.