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.

Continuous Monitoring With Tail Fails

If you can’t get tail command to continuously monitor a file, then read on. I was working on a script yesterday, a part of which depended on continuous monitoring of a text file. I had used our trusty old “tail” command for this but while testing by manually putting in some data into the file, it was failing but curiously it was working fine when used in actual scenario. Befuddled, I did a simple test. I created a simple text file “a.txt” with a few lines of data and then ran the following command.

Paradise For Overclockers, Gamers and PC Enthusiasts In India

This is just to let you know that a few of my friends have started Overclocked, a haven for PC enthusiasts in India. Overclocked is an online store for the people who like to stretch the performance of their machines to the maximum. They store a lot of high end computer stuff that isn’t easy to find in India and that too for a reasonable price. They also assemble mean gaming machines while giving you quite a bang for your buck with gauranteed satisfaction, shipped anywhere in India, and that’s not all, they can personalize it too with a variety of custom modifications (I really like their laser engravings).

grub and knetworkmanager problems in Kubuntu Karmic

I generally move from LTS to LTS releases of Ubuntu but reluctantly had to update my system to Karmic when my old HDD gave in. I also thought of trying out Kubuntu (KDE based) this time as I had heard that its doing a lot of interesting things (Akonadi/Nepomuk etc) and that with 4.3.1 it is stable as well. The installation went fine, all over within less than half an hour and then the problems started. Here are the 2 main issues that I faced along with their solutions, in the hope that if someone else runs into same issues does not have to waste time (and hair) on it :)

Making Frets On Fire Work With Pulse Aludio - pasuspender

I recently got hold of a Guitar Hero controller for my PS3 but the game still had some time to come so I tried it out on my laptop with Frets on Fire (rather FoFix). But when I started it, it was crashing with some weird error about not being able to open mixer devices. Searching on the google, I came to know this is happening because of Pulse Audio as this application needs direct access to the sound devices and finally I came upon **pasuspender. **This little tool allows you to do that with ease. Just run it in the following way:

Killzone 2 Tips Tricks Tactics And Strategies : Engineer

Killzone 2 (KZ2) is one of my most favourite games for the Playstation 3. Killzone 2 is a very different game as compared to the other run-of-the-mill FPS’s out there. Now, I might not be the best player out there but I’ve played my fair share of it. So, I thought of jotting down some quick points for the different classes, how to play them and how to make the most of them according to my opinion. I hope to make this a series where I would discuss the strategies for a class and its primary and secondary abilities and once all classes are covered, I’ll probably touch upon the rest of the aspects of the game. Please read them and supplement them with real practice to see the benefits. And yeah, do not hesitate to point out the flaws if any and I’d also love to hear about the tactics that you follow as well as KZ2 is a game where the element of surprise is very important which calls for unusual strategies many times ;).
So without wasting any more time, here is a really really basic set that you should follow: