Musings on the Human Condition

  Parasites of Heaven by Leonard Cohen I want this blog post to be a placeholder (similar to the previous one on Sneaky Pete) for writing about my favorite music. I hope to return to this page over the years and add to it as I feel inspired.  This is going to be a very special list (the ones in  bold ) while the rest will be acknowledged in  italics  or not at all. I can only speak to my formative influences, which would likely be different from yours. Leonard Cohen.  Poetry has never come easily to me, except when I hear it in the soothing, booming voice of Leonard Cohen. My baba had a copy of Cohen's  Parasites of Heaven  (poems) on his bookshelf. I called my dad baba, the word for dad in Bengali, a touching tribute from him to the language of his professors and colleagues at his alma mater IIT Kharagpur. Had it not been for that, I might never have given Cohen's music the chance it deserved. That's what upbringing can do. My dad also introduced...

THIS IS A GREAT SERIES! This short series is totally the kind of content I would watch again, and again. Sort of like the movies Pulp Fiction or Sholay (for Bollywood fans) with their impregnable dialog and theater.  It's kryptonite for a geek like me. The series discusses a whole slew of cons and I can barely keep up. For example, Huckleberry Jones versus the little sister Sadie Jones. What? My goal is to watch and rewatch until I can list most or all of the cons, roles, and metaphors mentioned in the series. Here's a start. I hope to return here many to time to keep updating this list. If you know some that I missed, please add them to the comments. Safe Mr Success The Roll Over Coyote is always hungry The Spanish Prisoner Lady Macbeth Painting houses Justified Captain Whale Mechanic Rope Mark Huckleberry Jones Sadie Jones

I grew up in a family where we didn't feel comfortable going to our parents for help . My hope is that I wasn't that kind of father but I'm sure I was, at least to some extent. I can count on one hand the times I reached out to my baba (dad) for help. Perhaps there were more and I just remember the more memorable ones? But overall, I think my dad didn't excel at commiseration. I generally felt like I was being talked down to. One of my vivid memories is going to the living room where my dad used to sit in his standard spot on the couch and asking him to help me with the equation of a line. He certainly helped clear a lot of my doubts and explained what y = mx + b really means.  Not to bore you to death, but briefly, y is the vertical position of any spot on a line and x is the horizontal position of that spot (aka point for math junkies). If you assume m=0 and b=0, you get y = x , which means you get a 45 degree line sloping about half way up like a javelin . From ther...

I was reading the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World . One of the chapters talks about the invention of LCD screen-based games at Nintendo.  And I remembered that growing up my brother Harmeet and I had the game Oil Panic , which was part of the "Game and Watch" series (they added a watch to the game console), which I’m sure baba (dad) must have bought for us on one of his trips abroad.  Harmeet was really good at it. Me not so much. Our kids, Ria and Ronak, grew up playing Nintendo Wii and 3DS (among other consoles), but primarily Nintendo. The book really highlights how the gaming company and global trend was fashioned by one engineer's way of thinking that was more generalist (like mine) than specialist. Read the book to find out what I mean.

  What Is This About? Since MCP servers (AI agents or Agentic AI) are all the rage, I figured "how hard can it be to build one?" What Is MCP? MCP and the AI Agent Landscape Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard created by Anthropic (the makers of Claude.ai) to action the promise of Agentic AI or AI Agents, that are supposed to be the intermediaries between humans and AI to help humans get stuff done. They also help Claude connect to the outside world, like the Web or your filesystem. Give Me More Context Claude's training with public data ended around October 2024. So, when you ask a question, Claude isn't generally aware of late-breaking information. Claude also doesn't automatically carry memories or context of what you discussed in earlier chat sessions. That's where MCP servers come in. They allow Claude to access data it wasn't trained with and use its training to answer our " today " questions using a combination of " traini...

I wrote an AI-assisted Python program to take my Web-based  timeline of Sikh affairs and convert it into a 169-slide PDF for easy viewing.  I started this project as a way to create a more user-friendly way for people to consume the timeline I created years ago based on  many hours of research and analysis over a number of years. My goal was to improve the formatting and add images for a more informative viewing experience . In other words, how to use the content you have and breathe new life into it . The programming effort took a couple of half days and some 500 odd lines of Python code. I used AI (Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity) to provide suggested approaches and code, but didn't directly integrate it into my editor. I use Sublime for editing and selectively cut and paste recommended code as needed. The alternative is too intrusive and AI has free reign to make changes to your code wherein you eventually lose track and control over your program and no longer fully u...

  Further to my previous post on Claude AI , since most of the GenAI tools (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude) present their default results in markdown, I have been looking for a reliable way to render the markdown.  Additionally, I want to be able to highlight, annotate and save the results for future reference. I reviewed a number of PDF tools. Adobe Acrobat (too expensive) Foxit PDFExpert (doesn't handle PDFs generated from markdown too well; while trying to highlight, it keeps selecting two lines instead of one) PDFGear (great for structuring if you want to add bookmarks like I did for Saurabh Mahapatra's thesis on Adobe Experience Platform's Data Distiller, but not much else) Skim , the most unpretentious on the tools on the list. But it handles highlighting on PDFs generated from markdown just fine. But more importantly, it refreshes when I update the PDF from markdown. My choice of Skim requires further elaboration. When I am researching a topic on Claude, I am constantly upd...

  I spent the Saturday assembling a cedar planter, catching up with a college friend from IIT Roorkee, and exploring Anthropic's new model context protocol for their AI tool Claude.  Yup, that's how I roll! Claude now has richest set of MCP servers  that can be integrated into Claude to augment its capabilities to, for example, search the web (think of it as a sort of RAG), search your filesystem, search your Google Drive, and best of all, save memories about your preferences that Claude can recall and leverage in future exchanges. Think of MCP servers as Anthropic's open-source framework aimed providing a bridge for AI agents or agentic AI to access real world data . In large language models (LLMs), "context" refers to the information the model can "remember" during a single interaction — typically the prompt, any system instructions, and previous exchanges. This is often measured in tokens . One more thing, unless you're running a quantum ...

  I am starting a new "Solve It!" series of blog posts. This book came highly recommended to me many years ago and sadly I never gave it enough of my time. If I can still find it in my shed, I will give it another attempt. It thought of the book because I was reminded of it while trying to come up with a title for this series of blog posts. The book talks about problem solving strategies in mathematics. I won't discuss math here, but the idea is the same. You have to be a deep thinker to solve everyday problems. Contrary to Nobel Prize winners and such, my fascination in life has been with solving the common problems that plague us. The problems are common but the solutions often seem to evade us. This blog series will provide a few examples. Getting the kitchen sink to drain reliably If this sounds like a trivial problem to you, it is likely because you don't cook much or you just call the plumber. Here are the key elements to consider. The word  plumbing  should be ...

  Boondi strainer. Homemade yogurt. Madani, used in India as a whisk to turn the yogurt into a homogenous state. Pre-mixing, to give you a sense of the ingredients. Yup, I use a lot of chili. Post-mixing. The final product. My Distaste for Milk My obsession with raita might have its origins in the distaste I developed for milk after moving from Canada to India at the age of 3. Canada generally uses cow milk and India uses mostly buffalo milk, since cows are considered scared in India.  Furthermore, in Canada milk arrived in pasteurized form from the supermarket. Whereas in India the milk arrived at your doorstep in the form known as raw (or unpasteurized) in the West.  So, my mom would boil it, which would result in the formation of malai (clotted cream) on top of the container of boiled milk once it was left to cool off. I never liked malai and was constantly struggling to remove it from my glass of milk. Furthermore, to make my life even more miserable, we were blessed ...