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.

Want To Program Smartly In C? Use GLib

Shantanu Goel

GLib - An Introduction:

GLib is a utility library for C, which augments the standard C library in several purposeful ways to make your life that much easier while programming. GLib has the following things to offer you:

**1. Portability: **The main issue that haunts any C developer is the portability of code. One cannot rely on the standard C library for this as you may find many functions that work differently under different platforms are aren’t there at all sometimes. GLib ensures that the all the functionality exposed by it remains consistent across platforms, so that you can rest assured that your code will work the way its supposed to work irrespective of the Operating System it’s being used for (Of course, this assumes that you have ensured about portability aspects of your non-GLib related source code). Moreover, GLib is available for a vast array of contemporary Operating Systems including GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

Http 406 Errors Galore

Shantanu Goel

If you have ever had these errors or just want to be prepared in case they pop up somtime (and they surely will), then read on as I discuss various situations that lead to them and also their solutions.

I generally use desktop clients (mostly blogjet, but also Windows Live Writer and Scribe Fire sometimes) to blog to my WordPress based blogs. Some months ago, I started getting “Http 406: Not Acceptable” error while posting a particular post. Tried posting through the WordPress inbuilt TinyMCE editor, but got the same result. A little bit of research told me that this was because the post contained some words that were considered harmful by the “mod_security” plugin for apache that had been installed by my host to prevent hacking attempts. The quick resolution was to include the following lines in my .htaccess:

Page Rank 7: True Or Google Glitch?

Shantanu Goel

I installed google toolbar (linux version) today in firefox and for this blog, it says that its page rank is 7. I can’t believe my eyes. I suppose it’s a google glitch may be (but have a wishful thinking at the back of mind that its true :-) ).

Are you getting the same result for this blog (or weird page rank results for other places that you frequent?)

tech_shantanugoel_com_pagerank_7_thumb

Windows App Alternatives For Linux: MSPaint

Shantanu Goel

Some of you might know that I was in the hunt for a decent mspaint alternative recently. Note that I didn’t go for GIMP / Inkscape etc because they were overkill for what I wanted to do. Many a times, I just wanted to touch up a screenshot or make a simple flow image by drawing a few boxes, use a few pointing arrows, and add some text here and there. All this could be done with the previous mentioned programs as well but took a bit more steps than I wanted (stroking the selections / paths for lines, boxes, circles, and even then, no arrows). I didn’t find an adequate replacement at the time but got it now, so thought of writing about it. Basically I came across 4 apps: tuxpaint, gpaint, kolourpaint and mtpaint. Won’t discuss tuxpaint here cuz I found it a little too kiddish.

ImageMagick: Weaving Magic With Your Pictures

Shantanu Goel

I’ve known about ImageMagick tools for quite some time now but never dabbled with it. A couple of weeks ago I played with it for some time (notice the new cascaded polaroid pics header above) and was amazed even more. Few of its shining features:

  • It has almost unlimited features to manipulate your images through its tools like convert, montage, mogrify etc and their long list of options.

  • It is available for Windows, Linux and Mac as well.