Install Ubuntu 9.04 on hard disk partition using ISO image without CD

[ Found this Ubuntu page with a "safer" (official) solution. Follow those steps for better guarantees. :) ]

Problem

Your desktop/laptop has a partition where you want to install Ubuntu 9.04. You have downloaded the Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop ISO image which is a LiveCD. But you cannot burn the image on to a CD - either your CD writer is not functioning properly or you do not have a spare CD - or may be you do not want to use a CD to begin with.

Your machine boots using GRUB.

Say you do not want to use a NetBoot approach, and do not want to download/use an Alternate CD ISO image. For various different installation options, check the official Ubuntu pages on installation.

I assume you know how to install Ubuntu to a partition from a LiveCD desktop, but this time, you do not want to burn a CD.


Solution

[ I found this procedure here and followed this procedure for installation on my laptop. Usual Disclaimer : Your mileage may vary. :)]

The ISO image you have downloaded is a LiveCD - a LiveCD can be used to boot up your machine in Ubuntu without an installation, and you can also install it on to the hard disk from the LiveCD desktop.

Step 1 : First you need to decide where you want to store the ISO image and Ubuntu boot-up files, for use by the Ubuntu installation. The important point to remember is that the partition where you store these files should not be the same as the partition where you want to install Ubuntu; since the installation will format the partition where Ubuntu is to be installed. The partition can be a vfat or ext partition.

For instance, let us assume you want to install Ubuntu to a partition called /dev/sda2 (Second Partition if you look at the Hard Disk Layout in a tool such as GParted or Partition Manager). That partition will be formatted during installation.
And say you have a FAT partition (that you use to store and share data between Linux and Windows) /dev/sda7. And you decide to store the ISO image and other Ubuntu boot files for installation, in the file system on /dev/sda7.

Step 2 : Create a directory in the ; lets name it Ubuntu904.
$ mkdir /Ubuntu904

Step 3 : Extract and Store the Ubuntu boot files into Ubuntu904 directory. Say the name of the ISO image file is Ubuntu904.iso.
$ mount -o loop /Ubuntu904.iso /media/cdrom
$ cp /media/cdrom/casper/vmlinuz /Ubuntu904
$ cp /media/cdrom/casper/initrd.gz /Ubuntu904

Step 4 : Copy the ISO image into the Ubuntu904 directory.
$ cp /Ubuntu904.iso /Ubuntu904

So the Ubuntu904 directory now has the ISO image Ubuntu904.iso, the vmlinuz file and the initrd.gz file.

Step 5 : Put an entry into GRUB to boot from the LiveCD ISO image. Note that you might want to have superuser privileges to edit GRUB menu. Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add this entry at the end :
title Install Ubuntu 9.04
root (hd0,6)
kernel /vmlinuz boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/Ubuntu904.iso
initrd /initrd.gz


Note the (hd0,6) entry above. This is the partition number where you have stored the Ubuntu boot files and ISO image. You have stored it in /dev/sda7 (7th partition on your only hard drive), which in (hdA,B) notation, would translate to (hd0,6) if the hard disk you are operating on is the only hard drive. This is because hard disk partition numbers in (hdA,B) format start from 0 and not 1.

Once you have added an entry like the above, save the menu.lst file and reboot.

Step 6 : On reboot, you will see the "Install Ubuntu 9.04" entry in the GRUB menu. Selecting that will make the system boot using the Ubuntu ISO image (LiveCD image) and will give you a Ubuntu 9.04 LiveCD Desktop - just as if you would have burned a LiveCD and booted from it.

Step 7 : Once the desktop is up, open a Terminal and unmount the /dev/sda7 partition.
$ umount -l /dev/sda7

Step 8 : Now proceed to click on the "Installer" icon on the desktop and install Ubuntu as you would have from the LiveCD desktop. In the partitioning step, select the Advanced Layout (Manual) option and then you can select the /dev/sda2 partition to put Ubuntu Root (/) on to.

Choose your Linux Distribution

A few days back, I was browsing around to see if I can find a distribution similar to Ubuntu, but that came a number of built-in features (such as playing mp3s) that folks migrating from Windows would expect to be present by default. Of course, I can install Ubuntu and then download and install the codecs, but the target machine does not has a limited usage network connection. And yes, I could have built a custom-Ubuntu snapshot distribution from my home machine that is running Ubuntu and that has all the software for usual tasks, but I thought it would be a good exercise to find and try out another Linux distribution that fits these criteria.

With some browsing around, I came to the conclusion that may be I should go and try Linux Mint - as usable as Ubuntu with all the basic built-in features like mp3 support, as expected by new migrants from Windows world, and Linux Mint can use the same Ubuntu package repositories as well, so no dearth of software.

During my search, I found a link to this Linux Distribution Chooser. It asks you certain questions to ascertain what you are looking for in your choice of a Linux distribution, and suggests you a few Linux distributions that fit your criteria. Thought to give it a try. And guess what turned up as the best fit : Linux Mint 6 (Codename Felicia) and the next best fit : Ubuntu. So I was not wrong in my search, after all! Try the distribution chooser and see what suits you. :) I am quite sure there would be more such distribution choosers available.

Oriya Tube

OriyaTube is a video sharing site modeled on YouTube, but it deals solely with videos in Oriya - videos of Oriya movie songs, Oriya album songs, and looking at the site, it seems they are coming up with categories like news and politics, art and culture, Oriya awaredness, education etc.

Clap, clap, clap !!!

"liamG" aka "Inverted Gmail", or is it Firefox?

Thought I would break my hiatus from blogging with this amusing picture.

Logged into Gmail today and the world seemed straight as usual, but only for a while. Once I clicked on a message, the Gmail page simply got inverted. Look for yourself.



No, I did not do any image editing gimmick. You gotta believe me :)

The other tabs in Firefox were normal though. Once I clicked on an unvisited link on the Gmail page, everything was back to normal.

Am not too knowledgeable about this, but my guess is Firefox messed up this time.

UPDATE :
Well, looks like I was unaware of this feature of Firefox. One of the right-click action menu items in Firefox is "Switch Page Direction". And it was this that I accidentally clicked when I saw the Gmail page inverting. I discovered this feature today accidentally when I right-clicked on a page.
Sorry to the Firefox guys for my rant on if Firefox messed up. :(

Which superhero are you?

It has been a long while since I posted last.
So why not get into mood with this?
Took a superhero quiz and here are the results.

**********

Your results:
You are Superman

Superman 85% Hulk 75% Robin 62% Supergirl 60% Green Lantern 55% The Flash 55% Batman 55% Spider-Man 50% Wonder Woman 45% Iron Man 35% Catwoman 20%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

I am C

Which Programming Language are You?

ScribeFire

Yep, I am lazy !!! Sometimes it seems quite some task to open a tab, point to my blog, sign in, and then post something.

But ScribeFire is a Firefox extension that makes life really easy for me. Simply install ScribeFire onto your Firefox browser, tell ScribeFire about your blog, and use ScribeFire's editor to post to your blog. The editor is really similar to what your blog provides. The best part is you can manage multiple blogs (of different blogging services) very easily.

And yes, I've put in this post using ScribeFire. :)


PS : I am posting this note from Blogger, after publishing the post using ScribeFire. The post looks good. One minor point though. By default, ScribeFire adds a "Powered by ScribeFire" line at the end of the post. However, it can be disabled in the Settings tab of ScribeFire panel.

Oriya music

I was born and brought up in Bhubaneswar, the capital city of Orissa. Orissa is a beautiful state along the eastern coast of India facing the Bay of Bengal, and has a rich culture and heritage, replete with stories of devotion and sacrifice, grandeur and resplendence.

Orissa has had a film industry for more than half a century now, and songs have been a major part of the movies always. Oriya movies of the 1960-90s boasted of brilliant songs, soothing to the ears and really refreshing for the mind. Of course, the Oriya movies of late have been, IMHO, a shade pathetic when it comes to music.

Anyway, it is always an experience to be audience to the "old" Oriya songs. Recently I found some online music repositories that provide access to listen to these really beautiful classics online.

www.oriyamusic.com
www.musicindiaonline.com/music/oriya
www.purionline.com/entertainment

So tune in and escape into the serene world of the yesteryears.

Happy Pi Day

Yes, "Pi" is the same number you read about in your math textbooks at school. For those who can't remember what on earth it was, let me refresh their memories. Ahem Ahem... The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is constant for all circles, and the constant is called Pi which approximates to 3.14, if we consider two decimal places.

Pi Day is a fun and unofficial holiday celebrated on March 14 by math lovers around the world. Why March 14? March corresponds to 3 (third month) of course, and so 14th March can be thought of as 3.14. Well actually, the story goes further than this. People usually convey their wishes at 1:59 pm on 14th March, as the decimal representation of Pi is like 3.14159...

Math lovers (mostly in universities) celebrate this day by getting together and discussing about the history of the "loved" number, having contests to see how many digits of Pi one has memorized, and eating pies, of course.

Now shifting to a serious mathematical note, the number "Pi" has been shown to have multiple interesting properties. Two of those are as follows :

• It is an irrational number, which means it cannot be written as a ratio of two integers (a close approximation is 22/7).

• It is a transcendental number too, which means there does not exist a non-zero polynomial with rational coefficients that has Pi as a root.

A widely believed conjecture related to Pi is that it is a normal number. A normal number is a real number whose representation in any base has digits (or whatever they are called in some base) in a uniform distribution. In other words, any substring of digits is equally likely to occur in the representation of Pi. If you think more about this, then you can surely arrive at this hilarious conclusion.

So folks, here's to you wishing a Happy Pi Day !!!

PS :
(1) July 22 is celebrated as Pi Approximation Day (Think 22/7).
(2) Not sure if its a coincidence :), but March 14 is Einstein's birthday.

Cool navigation feature in Konqueror

Why does one use mouse while browsing? Primarily to click on hyperlinks, of course. Recently, I came across this cool feature in Konqueror which allows you to browse around using keyboard only.

Try this. Go to some web page using Konqueror, and press the Control key on your keyboard.
Konqueror would provide you with tooltips on the webpage, that associate a key with each link on the webpage. Pressing the correct key would take you to the associated link, in the same manner as would have happened if you had clicked on the link with the mouse. This feature is probably called Access Keys Control.

The screenshot shown here is what it looks like. Notice that the "A" key is assigned to two links in the screenshot. This is because both the hyperlinks point to the same location. Hmm, smart, real smart... :)

FYI, the version of Konqueror on my system shows "Konqueror 3.5.5 (using KDE 3.5.5)". I ain't sure if the older versions have this feature.

However I think there is a problem here. As far as I know, Konqueror uses the alphanumeric keys (A-Z,0-9) for labelling links on a web page. Now what happens once the number of links on the web page exceeds the total number of alphanumeric characters (which is 26+10=36)? I found out that only the first 36 links are alloted keys for navigation, while the rest of the links are not. This looks like a shortcoming to me, unless there is some other way to label all the links on a webpage, however many there are. A better solution would be, IMHO, to label only the links on the webpage that are visible at a time in the browser window. In this manner, once the user scrolls down the webpage and finds more links, the keys can be reassigned. In other words, the assignment should be dynamic. Although one could argue that this method would fail if the number of links visible at a time exceeds the total number of alphanumeric characters, the proposed method is still better than statically assigning keys only to the first 36 links.

Anti-matter therapy for cancer

Well who could have thought of this!!! Anti-matter, that has been at the core of volumes of recent research in physics, has found its way into medical science and therapy. Recent announcements by CERN lab in Geneva have hinted at the idea of using anti-matter to target cancer cells resulting in intense biological damage of the cancerous cells leading to their death.

In fact, particle physics is already playing a role in cancer treatment today. Radiotherapy for cancer results in exposure of some non-cancerous parts of the body to harmful radiation. Applications from particle physics help reduce this collateral radiation by a significant amount.

Cisco aims at "social networking" for customers

Cisco systems (yes, the networking giant!!!) has made two acquisitions recently - Five Across, Inc. and Utah Street Networks, Inc.

Now why is this such a big news? Coz both the acquired companies are related to social networking.

In their own words, Five Across, Inc. is "a leading provider of social networking and community building technology that helps organizations ranging from small businesses to large enterprises connect to their community constituents and customer base". On the other hand, Utah Street Networks, Inc. is the operator of the social networking site Tribe.net, a San Francisco company that allows people to network online and build communities(tribes).

So what is Cisco doing in "social networking"?
Well, until now, there is no news of Cisco entering the Web 2.0 or social networking arena for common people. It sure wants to use the technology bought to build social networks, but for its own clients so that big and small consumers of Cisco products can network online.

However, there seems to be another interesting reason behind Cisco's decision.
An online article says this :
"The move is understandable, though. Based on conversations with three or four different Cisco executives in recent months, it is clear Cisco sees social networking and the wider Web 2.0 phenomenon as ways to drive Internet traffic, and thus traffic over their routers and other networking gear — and, it follows, more revenue for Cisco."

For direct news announcements from Cisco Networks, read this and this.

Worm attempts to exploit Solaris telnet vulnerability

Yesterday, I blogged about the Solaris Zero-Day Telnet Vulnerability discovered a couple of days back. Now, security firm Sophos is warning Solaris users of a new worm that is trying to exploit the vulnerability in the in.telnetd(1M) binary in Solaris.

The Unix/Froot-A worm (also known as Wanuk) tries to gain access to Solaris machines. Machines running Solaris that have not been patched with the recent fix for the bug and which have telnet access enabled could be infected by this worm. Under certain conditions, the worm sends system broadcast messages that could appear as a text message or as an ASCII art.

Users of Solaris are advised to disable telnet access and patch their systems with the recently released fix. Read this and this for news coverage of this issue.

Solaris Zero-Day Telnet Exploit

The incident happened around two weeks back. But for one reason or the other, I have not been able to post about it. Pardon me, readers, for this negligence!!!

Recently, a zero-day exploit in the in.telnetd(1M) binary shipped with Solaris came to light.

For readers who are not aware of what a zero-day exploit is, let me first take a step back and explain what a zero-day exploit is. When a vulnerability is found in a piece of software, the announcement of the vulnerability goes online for the benefit of the vendor as well as people using the software. The vendor rushes to fix the vulnerability and release a patch to the software before the exploit (piece of software that exploits the vulnerability) is released to the public. The term "zero-day exploit" refers to an exploit which is released to the public (by the people/group who/that finds it) on the same day as the vulnerability or vendor patch.

The exploit for in.telnetd(1M) on Solaris was quite simple. If a Solaris machine had telnet access enabled, then anyone having network access to the machine could login to the machine as any user, without any password, using simply telnet.

Really, the exploit was as simple as issuing:
telnet -l "-froot" hostname/address ----> for root access

Actually, one can configure the Solaris machine to disallow remote login by root. If thats the case, one could give any username instead of "root" and login as a valid user.
Its easy to see how one could wreak havoc in such a case.

As soon as the news broke out on online forums, Sun engineers got to work on it. In fact, since the code was open, the poster actually pointed at the code that was messing up, and that speeded up the patch process. For a really good and interesting account of the patch process followed by Sun for the bug, read this blog posting by Alan Hargreaves, one of the Sun engineers working on the patch.

Now there were concerns as to how could such an exploit be overlooked in Solaris, especially since the same bug was identified on Unix in 1994. Sun engineer Casper Dik gives a really good explanation.

Anyway, Sun released the patch for the bug really fast, and I presume people around the world using Solaris would have installed it soon enough. One good point to notice is the fact that since OpenSolaris was open source, the exploit was found and then fixed really fast. One could argue that the open code could have contributed to the discovery of the exploit, but I would stress on the fact that the open code helped to find the fix fast as well. Bugs are present in software all the time, but fixing them and making them more robust is what counts more. So, making Solaris open source surely helped everyone!!!

For more details, read this.

Vint Cerf in Bangalore

If you are reading this blog, then you ought to owe your allegiance to Vint Cerf.

Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn are the creators of TCP/IP, the backbone protocol of the Internet. Quite commonly referred to as one of the "Founding Fathers of Internet", Vint is currently a Vice President and the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. He and Bob Kahn jointly received the ACM Turing award in 2004.

Vint was in Bangalore recently, and Google had arranged for a talk by him as part of its Speaker Series program in Bangalore. I was lucky to attend Vint's talk on the future of Internet. I must say he looked quite jovial and energetic, considering he is in his sixties.

Vint started the talk with a peek into the history of Internet and how TCP/IP came into existence. In one of his slides, he had a photo of himself, wearing a T-shirt with the caption "I P on everything". On Googling more, I just found out that his T-shirt had caused quite some stir at an IETF conference in 1992. And why not!!! IP was going to become a world standard.

During his talk, Vint gave plenty of examples how Internet is making its presence felt in every walk of modern human life. He also hinted at a couple of unsolved questions plaguing computer science and networking; and urged the "mix of academia and engineers" audience to ponder over such issues and contribute, in order to take technology a step further. Towards the end of the talk, he talked about one of the projects he is working on currently - the "InterPlanetary Internet Project" in progress at Jet Propulsion Lab, which aims at designing a network pervading our solar system in order to facilitate high speed and quantity of data transfer between remote space exploration stations, rovers and base stations on earth. (Please note that this project is not a Google project.)

At the end, there was a Q&A session, where the audience poured over their questions on Vint regarding a variety of topics, ranging right from ways to bridge the digital divide in India, to why Vint decided to join Google. The session ended with a standing ovation to Vint, and with one particularly interesting comment/question from someone in the audience : "Did the term 'surfing', by any chance, originate from 'Cerf'? I'm a child of the Internet; Thanks GrandDad!!!" :)

When I came out of the auditorium, I was thanking and admiring Vint and others for their pioneering work, without which my blog would be just a personal diary in my desk drawer.

PS : For a history of ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, read this; and you will be aware of many stalwarts who contributed to the birth of the Internet.
Read this for a detailed account from Vint on the birth of the Internet.

Pirates of Silicon Valley

You could call me a sloth. But I wouldn't deny that I love to sit back and relax on weekends, especially if I have a good book or movie for company. Going by these rules, last weekend was a great one for me. I started reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, and I watched two movies - Tarzan (Disney animation) and Pirates of Silicon Valley. I will defer my comments on the book for another post. Tarzan was a good one too. But I cannot wait to post a note about Pirates of Silicon Valley.



The movie shows the rise of Microsoft and Apple during the 1970-80s. Starting with the college lives of the members of the two camps - Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple) on one side, and Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer (Microsoft) on the other, the movie progresses with the brewing struggle between the two stalwarts, Jobs and Gates. The story documents the trials and tribulations the two camps went through, and the ethical (or unethical?) decisions they took. The movie beautifully depicts Jobs and Gates as individuals - their business acumen, their passion and dream for success, and the way they moulded the destiny of humanity with regards to computers and technology.

I do not want to put the details in here and be a spoilsport. :)
People ought to watch the movie for themselves.
For folks who know most of the facts about the rise of Microsoft and Apple, it might simply be a refreshing summary. But for people who are largely unaware of the history, its an eye-opener!!!

Happy New Year

Heart-felt wishes for the new year!!!

For the Christmas holidays, I went back home to enjoy the holidays and new year with my parents. My hometown is Bhubaneswar and I work in Bangalore. I decided to go home quite late and I must tell you that I had a real,real tough time getting tickets for travel. Anyway, I managed to get flight tickets on Kingfisher airlines, for a break journey to Bhubaneswar via Hyderabad.

Flying in India is not as easy on the pocket as in the developed countries (I do not have exact data though.) If one has time and one can endure a long train journey, its probably wise to travel by train from Bangalore to Bhubaneswar. But I must warn you that when I say that the train journey is "long", its really "long" (about 28 hours). Indian readers might not find this unsettling, but such a long journey for some tourist from a developed country would surely not be alluring enough.

It was probably the fourth time I was flying. I had got the aisle seat though I would have surely liked a window seat. Anyway, everything went fine and the flight from Bangalore to Hyderabad soared beyond the clouds in no time. The guy at the window seat in my row dozed off quite soon. I was kinda sleepy too, when suddenly I gazed out of the window. I swear the sight was breath-taking. We were above some clouds and the morning light played on the upper layers of the clouds quite brilliantly. It was all clothed with a shade of orange, and the interplay of light and shadow among the clouds was amazing. I kept on looking at the sight outside and wondered if such a sight was banal enough for the guy dozing off next to me. Anyway, I reached Hyderabad in some time, and then I realized that the flight to Bhubaneswar was delayed due to fog.

In the afternoon, my flight for Bhubaneswar took off and I was really happy that I would be reaching home in a short time. I was reading a Poirot mystery and was looking outside at times to find the sun at its peak; but the light-shadow effect was not as great as in the morning. The flight crowd this time was a bit noisier.



Well, I was starting on my reading session when suddenly an idea occurred to me. Every seat on the flight has a small television screen attached, so that the passenger can watch some television channels and can get important flight-related information. One of the channels was giving information about the flight such as the height we were at, the speed at which we were flying and the outside temperature at the height, a map showing the course of the flight. etc. I thought it would be interesting to see how the outside temperature varied with the height above sea level. So I took out my pen and paper and jotted down the displayed data about outside temperature and height. Just out of curiosity, I have now plotted the data using gnuplot.

Well, the data points do not look like fitting onto a well-known curve. The variation at altitudes closer to the ground level seems quite linear. Although I have fewer data points for the higher altitudes, the variation there looks to be approximately linear too. The only break in the "rough" linearity comes somewhere around 2250 metres. Though I am not quite sure, but my guess is that the clouds were present close to this altitude, which would mean that the upper layers of the clouds would have a higher temperature owing to the direct sunlight, while the area just below the clouds might be cooler. Just a guess though !!!

Some PhD in atmospheric sciences might derive more sense out of this. :)

Google PageRank

Ever wondered how the search giant finds the best matches for what you are looking on the web? You might be knowing that it uses some sort of page ranking algorithm to rank content on the web, and finds you the highest ranked content that matches your search. But a little peek into the details of the algorithm would make you think how an idea could be so original and successful, although everything about it seems obvious after its proposed.

Google uses the PageRank algorithm, developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, to calculate the importance of pages on the web. The central idea of the algorithm is the fact that the number of pages that link to a particular page is in direct proportion to the conceived importance or rank of the page. Seems obvious, doesn't it? :)

Read this for a little more detail about the algorithm. The mathematical ideas are quite lucidly explained. If you do not want to go through the maths part, you can skip them happily; the ideas underlying the maths are discussed clearly and one is sure to understand the idea well.

Checkpagerank gives you an approximation of the PageRank of a URL, on a scale of 0-10, 10 being the highest. Type in a URL and have some fun.
Its pretty obvious which URL has a PageRank of 10. :)
Unfortunately, the present blog has a PageRank of zero. Folks, its time to unite and fight for a cause : link to my blog as much as you can !!!

"My School"

Sorry readers, this post is not about my school. Its about a TV program aired on National Geographic in India. (I am not sure if the same program is aired by Nat Geo all round the world.)

In this series that covers schools of remote villages in India, each episode is a narration by a small child about his/her daily life - what the daily routine entails, about his/her family and friends, and about his/her school.

The first episode I saw, some days back, was about a child in a village located amidst the mountains of Garhwal. The boy started his day with brushing his teeth with the cool and clear water of the stream flowing near his house. In the cold morning weather, he gathers his school bag and bids his mother goodbye, who's sporting a toothy smile. On the way, he passes by his friend's house, calls out to her, and both of them walk up to the school which is some distance away. He loves his school. At school, the children start the day with a prayer. One can see some children wearing torn shoes but still smiling. The boy likes Mathematics and English - "Maths because it teaches him to count and English because it would enable him to communicate with the external world". He wants to become a teacher when he grows up.

Yesterday, I was surfing through channels on the TV when I came across another episode of the same Nat Geo series. It was about a girl in a remote village in the Gajapati district of Orissa. I had missed the first half of the episode. But in the rest of the episode, the girl was describing what they learnt at school, and I found it really great. The children learnt to identify the letters of the Oriya alphabet in quite an innovative manner. Archery is one skill thats been practised through generations in the tribe. The children use bows and arrows to shoot at a target, which has the letters of the Oriya alphabet written on it. The children stand in a line, and the teacher calls out the letter that the children have to shoot at. This way they learn archery as well as the Oriya alphabet, in one of the most innovative and fun ways possible. At school, the children are also taught about the market trade. Tribals and villages from remote places usually earn a size-able part of their living by selling food products and handicrafts at the nearest town market. So at school, the children play games that makes them learn how to trade stuff, which is again a fun way of imparting education. The girl also talks about her family - consisting of a loving father, a hard-working mother who "never went to school herself, but makes sure that the girl is educated", and a very young kid brother.

Though I have seen only two episodes of this Nat Geo series, I have to admit that I'm impressed by it. Commendable work done by the crew surely!

Its great to know that people in the most under-developed of places even have come to realize the necessity of education, and most importantly education for girls too. Its good to see how education could be imparted the fun way, as a result of which children love to go to school everyday; unlike the monotony of the system in city schools which makes children invent excuses to bunk school. And in my humble opinion, "inventing excuses" would not exactly be categorized as "exercise for the brain" !!!

Blog baby, blog !!!

Yep, I was quite immune to the "blog" bug until now. Looks like it has finally broken through my defenses. :)

I ain't sure if I have any definite theme to base my blog upon. But I'm sure a mix of things would not detract visitors either.

To get things started, let me talk about the title of my blog a little. Frankly, I really didn't have a proper title in mind when I created this blog. So I just put in "three words" that came to my mind at that moment. In fact, just before I hit upon the idea of creating the blog, I was reading something online (I can't remember what though) that contained these "three words". So I put those in the "title" field and leaned back in my chair with great appreciation in my eyes - appreciation for those "three words" that made me start liking fiction. My earliest memory of reading fiction in my childhood days is that of poring through the pages of an "illustrated abridged children classic" copy of Moby Dick, borrowed from my best friend. (Thanks to him for getting me started with it.) "Call me Ishmael" are the starting words of Moby Dick !!! :)

Well, I think I'm done with my first post on the blog. Keep visiting for more stuff on various assorted themes. However, I deem it wise to mention that reading my blog during office hours would not necessarily fool your manager to think that you are working more or improving your technical excellence and contributing to the growth of the organization. So visit at your own risk, and sweet time of course.

See ya,
Sambit

PS : In case you want to read up more on Moby Dick or its author Herman Melville, Google and Wikipedia are your friends. You can also find the book online at Project Gutenberg.