About
TRB (The Real Bitcoin) is the Bitcoin reference client; a distillment of the Satoshi 0.5.3 codebase. TRB is not for casual Bitcoin users, it is for those aligned unwaveringly against the fiat empire. It is your armor, and it would serve you well to train with it on.
Bitdash.io (this site) monitors the state of reachable TRB nodes, the primary metric for measuring the health of the Bitcoin network. The table printed on the homepage highlights the centralization of the Bitcoin network, and the importance of running your own TRB node. The code for the crawler is open source for anyone who would like to run their own (see below).
How it Works
The data on this site is populated by a simple Bitcoin network crawler written in Python 2.7 with only a single third-party dependency (psycopg2 for interacting with the DB). The crawler is seeded with a list of known TRB nodes. Each node is sent a version message followed by a getaddr request. This method is then repeated recursively for each peer returned in response to the 'getaddr' request. The code for interacting with the Bitcoin protocol comes from asciilifeform's Watchglass.
The source code for the crawler can be obtained here. In addition to the dependencies mentioned above (python2.7, postgres, and psycopg2) you will need a working vtron to press the source tree. If you are new to using V you can read an overview of the what/why/how and obtain a working V kit that you can start using right out of the box.