I attended Barcamp Mumbai 9 at Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI), Mumbai, Maharashtra, India on Sunday, June 17, 2012. After an informal introduction, four parallel tracks were scheduled. Each session was 20 minutes long, and 10 minutes between talks for people to move between the halls. Although most of the talks were non-technical, there were quite a few interesting sessions.

Raj Desai presented on “The Math of Music”. He explained how the rhythms or beats used in music formed a pattern, and how they often use prime numbers. For example, a 5-beat sequence is made from a combination of a 2-3 beat sequence, or, a 7-beat sequence is made from a 2-2-3 or a 3-2-2 beat sequence. He also played the different beats, giving numerous examples.

Krishna Patel played the short movie “Geri’s Game” in his session on “How To Watch a Movie”, and explained the different aspects in a movie like composition, props, sound, colour etc. He mentioned that one might have to watch a movie several times focusing on just one aspect at a time to observe and learn how they have been used.

The session on “How to memorise a pack of 52 playing cards in under 2 minutes” by Aniceto Pereira taught how to use two simple mnemonic systems to memorise a pack of cards. For the four suites, we used the letters C (clubs), S (spades), H (hearts), D (diamonds). For each card in a suite, a consonant is assigned. For example, Ace was assigned the letter ’t’ or ‘d’, because there is one vertical line in it, referring to one. The number ‘2’ was assigned the letter ‘n’ because there were two downward strokes in it. So, if we had an Ace (’t’) of clubs (‘c’), we would combine the letter and the consonant to form an image, say “cat”, and associate it with our environment to remember it. For each card that we have, we build a series of images to remember them.

Anurag Patel’s session on “Sh*t people say to a chat bot” was hilarious! He had created http://rickfare.com to compute Mumbai’s autorickshaw fare calculation, and later added support for other cities as well. There were times when people started to chat with the bot, and he shared quite a few entertaining, priceless conversations from the server logs.

The talk on “Negotiating with VCs - An Entrepreneur’s Legal Guide” by Abhyudaya Agarwal was very informative, and detailed. I had presented “Quite Universal Circuit Simulator - A Qt Love Story”, an introduction to electrical circuit theory using Qucs. You can install Qucs on Fedora using:

  $ sudo yum install qucs

I also had a chance to stay at Anu Shakti Nagar, a quiet, serene, beautiful residential township in Mumbai in this visit. Few pictures taken during the trip are available in my /gallery.