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.

SpiderOak Promotion Code For Free Upgrade To 10 GB

Shantanu Goel

Just a small shout out to let you guys know that you can use the discount coupon code “linkup” while signing up the excellent online backup service SpiderOak to get a major bump to 10 GB from the 2 GB that they give to normal accounts.

For those who don’t know SpiderOak is a great online data backup service, with its major strengths being truly cross paltform (Mac/Linux/Windows – 32 bit as well as 64 bit), easy interface, rsync like differential backups to save time and disk space, versioned file history, web as well as client interface, unlimited number of devices, unlimited bandwidth, etc etc.

Firefox Incognito / Private Browsing Mode - Part II

Shantanu Goel

A few people (e.g. Varun) told me my previous post differed from the way how google chrome / Microsoft IE8 handle Incognito (Private Browsing) mode. The main consideration was that while chrome/IE8 don’t write anything to disk at all, the firefox method is an after-effect, i.e., writing to disk and then clearing it up while closing the window. Well, true but nothing is non-rectificable :). So this is a post about a method that one can use to go “really” undercover with firefox. But before we begin, please make sure you have read Part 1 of my post, because here I’ll start from the point where we left off in the earlier post.

Firefox Incognito Mode Is Here: Move Over Chrome/IE8

Shantanu Goel

Update: Part 2 of this post is now up here to allay some of the drawbacks that were pointed out.

There has been so much hype over the “Incognito” (or Private Browsing) mode of Google Chrome / Microsoft IE8, with many internet users screeming Hallelujiah. But I don’t understand what the hoopla is all about. This mode has always been there in Mozilla firefox as well. You just need to devote less than one minute (yes, you read that right, less than one minute) to set it up. Well, actions are better than words, so here it goes:

Hack: Pidgin-Gtalk Connection Problems - Get Around The Corporate Firewall

Shantanu Goel

I recently wrote a simple answering machine program/plugin for pidgin and someone asked me to port it to 32 bit. So I fired up pidgin within my virtual box installation at work (as I have only a 64 bit machine at home) but couldn’t get it to connect. Tried all sorts of methods found over the net of changing ports etc, set port forwarding in Virtual Box NAT, even switched to using a bridged host interface but still no go. On a whim, installed pidgin in the host, i.e., windows and still the same issue. Hmm, interesting.. But wait, gtalk client works, then what gives.

Apology For Bad Downloads

Shantanu Goel

Guys, for the past few days if you downloaded any “.tar.gz” packages from this site (like my splert or shantz-xwinwrap tools), then you’d have got a corrupt package. Turns out there was some issue with mime-types with my setup. I haven’t been able to resolve it still but have re-upped the packages in “zip” format. Please download them again. I apologize for the inconvenience.