Making logging output "interesting"

This slashdot article caught my interest last night: Logfiles Made Interesting with glTail. Basically a guy has written a Ruby on Rails program that parses Apache access logs and gives you a visual representation of them using OpenGL graphics.

The outcome of it looks pretty interesting, and it got me thinking about what else you can do. I'm wondering how we could visualise some log4net logging, maybe using the XNA framework to output the graphics.

So last night I coded up a simple UDP Socket listener, and made a mock application that logs out an XML event to a UDPAppender. I found it should be pretty simple to get the log events to an XNA application, and now I'm thinking how the logs that the Esendex system generates can be displayed in an interesting yet useful way.

I'll keep you posted if I do anything else.