[PLUG] [Event Report] Barcamp Mumbai 9, Sunday, June 17, 2012

[Shakthi Kannan]

Hi,

I attended Barcamp Mumbai 9 [1] at Veermata Jijabai Technological
Institute (VJTI) [2], 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" [3] 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 re-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 [4] 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" [5], an
introduction to electrical circuit theory using Qucs [6]. You can
install Qucs on Fedora using:

  $ sudo yum install qucs

I also had a chance to stay at Anu Shakti Nagar [7], a quiet, serene,
beautiful residential township in Mumbai in this visit. Few pictures
taken during the trip are available in my gallery [8].

SK

[1] Barcamp Mumbai 9. http://barcampmumbai.org/index.php/BCM9

[2] Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute. http://www.vjti.ac.in/

[3] Geri's Game. http://www.pixar.com/shorts/gg/index.html

[4] Anurag Patel. http://web.gnuer.org/blog/index.php

[5] Quite Universal Circuit Simulator - A Qt Love Story.
http://shakthimaan.com/downloads.html#qucs-a-qt-love-story

[6] Qucs. http://qucs.sourceforge.net/

[7] Anu Shakti Nagar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anushakti_Nagar

[8] Photos. http://www.shakthimaan.com/Mambo/gallery/album82

-- 
Shakthi Kannan
http://www.shakthimaan.com