A Silly Tool

By Mike Gunderloy Sunday, December 22, 2002 This time of year, it's hard to concentrate on work. So how about a tool so un-worklike as to be practically useless? I think that's an adequate description of HackerPacket. HackerPacket works in conjuction with Winpcap to capture and display traffic on your network. But it does so in a decidedly flashy way. HackerPacket takes a decidedly cyberpunk approach towards displaying data. Connections are towers, packets are blue blobs flying around. The whole gives you a sort of animated futuristic look at your network's activity, but at least on the computer I ran it on, it's too slow and CPU-intensive to be really useful. Sure is purty, though, and you can "fly" through the scene with keyboard or mouse commands. Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.

Home