[OT] mailing list connections...

["Ross McFarland" <rwmcfa1 neces com>]

after reading an article on slashdot yesterday that mentioned the idea of
determining connections/associations between people based on their e-mails i
decided to play around with the idea last night. the following is a link to am
image (rather large in dimension, moderate in size) of gtk-perl-list for the
month of february:
     http://www.neces.com/gtk2-perl/list.png
the graph is a pretty big mess and doesn't really mean much since it's
analyzing a mailing list's data, but it might be more interesting to run
something similar on a company's maillog's etc. it does quickly show that
muppet and myself are the primary patrons of the list and that we answer each
other quite a bit. muppet apparently sent something to himself. kaffee is in
there too, although doesn't have as many message as muppet and myself, and he
apparently always just replies to the list, replacing the to field with
gtk-perl-list.

it took 121 lines of perl code (and i by no means tried to optimize it in any
way shape or form.) i was pretty impressed that it was this simple. it outputs
a graphviz dot file that is run through the dot program to generate the image.

i'm probably going to look into playing with it some more as i think the idea
is pretty cool, at least i thought so, and figured others might as well.

-rm