Greetings, Earthling 🖖
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.
If you are a student (this works for non-students as well but I expect you to be honest ;) ), you can download a whole bunch of software for free. How? Well, all you need is to become an ACM student member, and join the MSDN AA (Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance) ACM Student Benefit Program.
Normally it takes around 19$ for you to become a student member but you can do it for free for a limited time by going to http://campus.acm.org/icpc/
Just came across this very cool online emulator that lets you get a first hand experience of how the Google Android based phone T-Mobile G1 (aka HTC Dream) will look and behave like. The sliding notification mechanisms look cool, few of the things aren’t working but still a good thing to check out. However, I don’t know if this is an official site by T-Mobile or not.
I updated my project splert to version 0.03 today.For those who don’t know splert is a tool that lets you convert the multi-client instant messenger pidgin (connects to gtalk, msn, yahoo, jabber, etc) into a full blown answering machine and much more.
The main changes are:
Now you can use other 3rd party twitter bots with it to get updates through twitter since the official twitter bot is down since a long time and there are no chances of coming back soon.
Recently I wrote a small autoreply-answering-machine app for pidgin with a simple premise. Send custom automatic replies to different people when they message you and came across a strange bug. It never sent the reply when you received the first message from someone. I was using the “ReceivedImMessage” signal over d-bus (or “received-im-message” for the plugin writers). What I found initially looked to be a gross and basic error by pidgin developers, but later found that it is indeed a good design and thought that I’ll make a post about it for the benefit of fellow pidgin plugin/app developers.
Update: In a thread about this post at Dropbox forums, it was brought to my notice that Dropbox has now changed its terms to remove the objectionable clause.
If you use dropbox (A popular online storage service with free 2 GB space), and use (or intend to use) its public or shared folders feature, then you must know something about the EULA (End Users’ LIcense Agreement). Yes, the one that you clicked “I Agree” on, without even reading one word of. Basically, you need to know the following lines: