Greetings, Earthling 🖖

I’m Shantanu, aka Shaan.

Your friendly neighborhood co-inhabitant of this tiny speck of dust, I maintain this site as a stochastic log of my calculations towards the futile aim of weeding out the anomalies from the equation that gives me my “42”.

In my Clark Kent mode, I spend my day at The Trade Desk, trying to crunch through petabytes of data and trillions of queries every day to understand the human behavior and make the advertising technology world a little bit better.

Before that, I spent a couple of decades in the Semiconductors world at Qualcomm and Google, building processors and AI accelerators, tinkering with chips, operating systems, device drivers, human interface devices, security et al.

When the lights go out everywhere, I like to don my maker hat and build stuff that no one wants.

I like to make and break things around me ranging from my smart toaster/TV to my web and phone apps to my car, strumming a bit of guitar, 3d printing stuff, and of course, shit-posting on twitter @shantanugoel.

Sometimes I post some of my travel and 3d print outputs on instagram, because I’ve been told by my gen-z interns that that’s a thing to do.

Do check out some of the other subdomains that I run.

Bugs: What you see is not always what it is

Shantanu Goel

Came across a neat nugget of historical information today that yet again proves that the software/hardware bug behavior that you may see on the surface might imply something totally opposite to what the problem actually is.

The “bug” existed back in the old times of the floppy drives. These drives seemed to fail very quickly on linux systems compared to MS DOS/Windows. Now, a normal observer would say linux had bad handling of the drives or was doing something messy that made these drives crap out ever so often. But as it turned out, the issue was the complete opposite. The real reason behind this problem was that linux was rock solid and stable compared to MS Dos.

SGX 543MP2 vs Mali-400: Is iPhone 4S GPU Really Twice As Strong As SGS 2?

Shantanu Goel

Ever since Apple announced the iPhone 4S having “A5” processor, everyone has been pointing to the below image from a test run by Anandtech and saying that the iPhone 4S will be twice as strong as the Samsung Galaxy S2. I beg to differ.

While the above test doesn’t have any discrepancy, one major thing is that the SGX 543MP2 results are from an iPad 2 (a tablet) while the Mali 400 results are from a smartphone. Thus, we can’t readily take this to directly and accurately predict the comparison results for iPhone 4S because there are other things to consider:

Deconstructing The Samsung Nexus Prime Video

Shantanu Goel

Samsung just uploaded a teaser video to Youtube which hints at the upcoming Android phone Nexus Prime with IceCream Sandwich. It has a sideways glance at what people believe is the Nexus Prime. I’ll deconstruct the image a bit.

The things to take away from here:

  1. The phone will have a curved display like Nexus S

  2. It has a power button on the side (right side, since it’s marked with the power icon)

Adding Lyrics to SharkZapper for Grooveshark

Shantanu Goel

I bet all of you know about grooveshark, the awesome music service. And sharkzapper is a cool chrome extension that puts the control and information about anything playing in your grooveshark chrome tab into a little button on the address bar. It is a very good extension but I felt that what it was missing was lyrics. Before I could comment on the extension’s chrome market page, I noticed that it has a github repository. “Open Source”, oh joy. So, I forked the repository and after some hacking around, I’ve now added support for automatic searching and fetching of the currently playing song into the sharkzapper popup window and it updates itself whenever the song changes.

Chrome Script/Extension installation error: Could not read source file

Shantanu Goel

This is a solution to the issue that I faced today while installing a javascript file from userscripts.org as an extension into google chrome (Yes, Chrome supports installing greasemonkey javascripts as extensions). I had already installed this script once into my browser earlier but when I tried installing it again today, it started giving me a weird error “Could not read source file”. I tried all possible means, like putting it on a different server, installing from local disk, changing versions, deleting all cache, etc but still the issue persisted.