By the way, I wrote a program like this a few years back called xui. See 
two examples:

http://www.reedmedia.net/software/xui/xui-example-network.xui-20020831.png
http://www.reedmedia.net/software/xui/xui-example-sample.xui-20020831.png

It has several menu options which can be piped into it.

Some notes (with some other programs listed) and code and sample 
specifications are in that directory.