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.

Hack:Disabling the Message Box In Oxios Memory Apps (Windows Mobile)

Shantanu Goel

**Update: **Modified the “Oxios Hibernate” app as well on public demand. Please redownload the below mentioned package. It now has Oxios Close as well as Oxios Hibernate.

Oxios developed a very useful tool for Windows Mobile (WM2003/5/6/6.1) called “Oxios Memory” sometime ago. On running it, it’ll flush your RAM (kind of) and recover substantial amounts of memory that can be used by the currently program. It is so good at this that many people run it regularly on their phones, and most of them want to run it in an automated mode (through a scheduler or a script). But the problem (so far) was that it generates a Message Box at the end for which the user has to press “OK” button to make it go away. There is no known way of disabling this message box and many attempts to work around it by scripting the “press OK” action have been very unreliable at best. Hence, it took it upon me today to remove this nagging problem and 5 minutes later we have a “clean” Oxios Memory.

Gmail Blocking Messages to Yahoo Groups?

Shantanu Goel

For the past couple of days I have been unable to send any mails to any of my yahoo groups through my gmail account. All my message are returned back with a “Message Rejected” failure. What I get back is a link to this support answer: Sector 5 Bounces. Anyone else seen this?

An Idea Is All You Need

Shantanu Goel

Everyone wants to make a name for himself. Everyone wants to do something new and extra-ordinary. People like me (read software engineers) want to develop “something” cool. BUT, the stage where most of them go wrong is the very first one. Most of them think that the road to develop something cool starts from a particular “language” or a tool. But I beg to differ. I say the first stage is “The Idea”.

Project: My WordPress Plugin shantz-wp-qotd updated to version 1.2.2

Shantanu Goel

Updated my WordPress plugin shantz-wp-qotd to version 1.2.2 today.

Introduction: Shantz WP QOTD is a plugin to add quotes to your wordpress blog in a few easy clicks. It adds quotes to your posts and your sidebars with a multitude of options for sources and customization.

Changelog:

Version 1.2.2

  • Fixed a bug because of which quotes were blank some times. Thanks to Thom for reporting it.

The Why Behind “Open Source”: In simple Terms

Shantanu Goel

Many people ask me why are people crazy about Open Source, or why does it even exist. After all if your code is out there, you can’t make money off it, right? Well, yes and no. Now, I ain’t no open source guru, but I do my part for it. Generally my explanations are either too complex, too full of extra details or mostly just described badly for a layman that I end up on square one, i.e., not convincing the sophomore who asked the question, looking towards me for the answer. Well, lets leave it for the experts to do the hard work, eh :-). Tristan Rhodes has explained the grand scheme behind it all in terms that would even make my grand mother under stand it.