I Wonder If I Could

Posted on Monday 3 February 2014 by J. D. Bartlett

Be warned: this article is a personal reflection.

A Park with Railings

When I’m out walking, I often walk along the wooden park railings.

I’ve always said that I value being willing to try new things. But I realised the other day that this doesn’t actually explain all of the unusual things that I do. For example, when I’m out walking, it’s not uncommon for me to jump up and walk along the park railings. I do this despite the fact that there’s a loud voice in my head saying “What will people think if they see you?”

Why would I do such an unusual thing? It’s not about trying something new—not after the first time, anyway. Do I do it to show off? Or because I think that having good balance is a skill worth cultivating? Or perhaps I value being unusual?

Some honest self reflection tells me that none of these reasons explain it. If I was showing off, or enjoyed being different, I wouldn’t be so worried about what others might think. I have no reason to believe that balance will be helpful for my future. I have come to the conclusion that I am motivated by “I wonder if I could”. I often wonder about things, and I often dream about what might be possible. And wondering is not enough for me. Once I have wondered about something, if the opportunity presents itself, I want to put that that thought to the test. I wonder if I would walk the whole way along this railing without falling off? I wonder how far along the railing I could get if I went at twice the pace? There’s only one way to find out.

Ultimately, I don’t consider my “What would people think?” or my “I wonder if I could” thought processes to be the most important things in life. But clearly “I wonder if I could” is powerful enough to trump “What would people think?” for me.

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Using My PC as a Temporary Wifi Access Point

Posted on Monday 6 January 2014 by J. D. Bartlett

Last weekend there was an electrical storm which took out my wireless access point. My Ubuntu desktop PC is wired and also has a wireless card, so today I set my mind to a temporary wifi solution until I get a new AP.

The Basic Setup

In order to use my wireless card in master mode (that is, as an access point), I needed to use hostapd. In order to bridge the wireless interface to the LAN, I needed to install bridge-utils. Both of those things are in the Ubuntu repositories:

$ sudo apt-get install hostapd bridge-utils

My hostapd config file looks like this (with the SSID and passphrase not included):

interface=wlan0
driver=nl80211
ssid=[MySSID]
hw_mode=g
channel=11
wpa=1
wpa_passphrase=[MyPassphrase]
wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
wpa_pairwise=TKIP CCMP
wpa_ptk_rekey=600
bridge=br0

For this to work though, the interface  br0  needs to be set up. You can set this up in /etc/network/interfaces, but since this is a short-term fix, I chose to just do it manually from a script.

# Add bridge interface and add eth0 to it.
brctl addbr br0
brctl addif br0 eth0

# Start the wireless gateway
hostapd hostapd.wlan0.conf

The Catch

The setup above made the wireless work fine for me, but it meant that my desktop couldn’t access the network itself. After much hunting around, I figured out that I had to remove the IP addresses and routes from  eth0  and add them to  br0  for this to work. This article that pointed me in the right direction.

My final script is:

#!/bin/bash

# Add bridge interface and add eth0 to it.
brctl addbr br0
brctl addif br0 eth0

# Remove IP address from eth0, add a static one to br0
ip addr flush dev eth0
ip addr add 192.168.1.188/19 dev br0

# Bring the interface up and set the gateway.
ifconfig br0 up
ip route add default via 192.168.0.254

# Start the wireless gateway
hostapd hostapd.wlan0.conf

Now as long as my desktop is switched on and running this script, I have WiFi access to my network.

 

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Queensland Senate Preference Visualisation

Posted on Saturday 24 August 2013 by J. D. Bartlett

Last weekend the details of candidates for the upcoming Australian Federal election were posted. Here’s a visualisation I’ve made of all the parties with group voting tickets for the Queensland senate. In general, parties closer together in the diagram give one another better preferences on the group voting tickets.

senate2013Where is the data from?

The Australian Electoral Commission makes data available in machine-readable form here.

What metrics did you use?

The ideal distance in arbitrary units between parties A and B is calculated as the number of candidates who would have to be eliminated before a vote above the line for party A would be transferred to party B, added to the number of candidates who would have to be eliminated before a vote above the line for party B would be transferred to party A. In cases where a party lodged multiple group voting tickets with the AEC, the average was taken between the values obtained using each ticket.

What algorithm did you use?

I used simulated annealing to minimise the mean square difference between actual distance and ideal distance for each pair of parties. I then adjusted the visual by hand to avoid having parties whose names overlapped one another.

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Lord of the Dance

Posted on Monday 19 August 2013 by J. D. Bartlett
Dancing

Dancing involves leadership

Regular readers will know that I enjoy dancing. When I dance, I am a leader with a single follower: my dance partner. In life I am a leader with many followers: at work, church, and in other areas of life.

I’m going to tell you some things about being a leader on the dance floor. It’s up to you to figure out how far these things apply to the rest of life.

As the leader of a dance partnership:

      • it’s my role to think several moves ahead
      • it’s my role to create opportunities for my follower to look good
      • I need to lead confidently and clearly or my follower cannot follow
      • I am responsible for my follower’s well-being
      • the dance is limited by the risks that I’m brave enough to take
      • I need to be creative and take initiative
      • I must tune in to the rhythm and tempo of the music, or I force my follower to choose between following me and following the music

What do you learn from dancing that you can apply in your life?

To complete this article, I leave you with some lyrics from Lord of the Dance.

They cut me down and I leapt up high,
I am the life that’ll never, never die;
I’ll live in you if you’ll live in me;
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.

Dance, then, wherever you may be;
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.
And I’ll lead you all wherever you may be,
And I’ll lead you all in the dance, said he.

—from Lord of the Dance, by Sydney Carter

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Snack, Staple and Story

Posted on Monday 22 July 2013 by J. D. Bartlett
Hebrew/Greek Bible

God’s living word

My friend Dani has recently returned from 5 months in Nepal. One part of her reflections especially stood out to me:

What’s hard is watching the Bible go from being a staple to a snack. I’ve come from a place where due to language barriers, the main thing that bound me together with other Christians was the Bible. This encouraged me to read it and desire it more and more. I’ve come from a place where Christians can’t seem to get enough of the Bible, to a place where it’s hardly even read. Sorry Australia. It’s not just me being a crazy person, either… I have statistics! Apparently only 1 in 5 Aussie Christians read their Bible daily. That makes me sad.

I have written about this before. The Christian church should be more than a social club. If the God of the universe has chosen to give us written record of has dealings with humankind, surely it’s worth devoting some of our time to reading it. And if, as the apostle Paul writes, God’s words are alive and powerful, then it’s worth not just reading the Bible, but soaking ourselves in it, and allowing it to transform the way we think, the way we treat others, and every other part of how we live.

In recent times I’ve been a part of a group of Christians learning to take passages from the Bible and turn them into good stories (without sacrificing accuracy). I’ve seen God do some amazing things through this process. Here are two reasons why I think this is worthwhile:

  1. It excites Christians about the Bible. People connect deeply with stories, and when Christians connect with Bible stories, it makes them want to go back and read the original, and maybe even tell the story to others, or craft another Bible story.
  2. It lets Christians talk about what they believe. Our culture says “Thou shalt not tell anyone what to believe”, and many Christians are afraid that if they talk about what they believe in front of people with different views, they’ll be seen as a militant evangelist. But stories are not confrontational. When you tell someone a Bible story, you can tell them what you believe without telling them what to believe. You can genuinely share who you are and what you hold important without fear of making others feel threatened.

Perhaps sharing Bible stories with one another will be part of the solution to the crisis of Christians who don’t connect with God’s word.

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