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.

WordPress 2.5 RC3 Released: Without Even An Announcement

Shantanu Goel

**Update: **I guess they didn’t announce it because they were about to release the final thing. Yes, WordPress 2.5 final has been released and even WordPress.org has undergone a total revamp to match the release.

Yes, I just downloaded it through WordPress.org though can’t find it being mentioned anywhere on WordPress Development Blog. Did they forget to announce it or somebody over at Automattic put up the link by mistake. Anyways, if you want to get it at the earliest as well, head over to the WordPress Release Archive and look at the very bottom of the page. Rest details later. I’m away to test it out on my home server.

Free Domain, Free Webhosting from Microsoft

Shantanu Goel

Microsoft is doling out a lot of free stuff today. If you have a Live ID, or have the patience of 5 minutes to fill up a small form to create a new one, you can get free domain name as well as free webhosting from then for one complete year. Cool, huh? All you need to do is click here.

A word of caution: Unless you are creating a new website just for kicks, you might want to check out the terms and conditions properly because I’m not sure whether you can transfer the domain name to some other provider after the one year is over.

HACK: Fixing The Code Syntax Highlighter WordPress Plugins To Work With WYSIWYG

Shantanu Goel

There are many code syntax highlighter plugins available for WordPress (e.g. iG Syntax Highlighter, WP-Syntax, etc) but almost all of them have a problem. They want you to write the code in “HTML editing mode”. If you use any kind of WYSIWYG or visual editors (like built in TinyMCE or offline clients’ similar modes), there is a grave problem. Your code becomes garbled. e.g.

If you intend to write:

cat abc > /dev/null

It might turn out as:

Project: Windows Mobile Tool ShantzTodayChanger Updated to version 1.53

Shantanu Goel

ShantzTodayChanger is a little tool written by me for your Windows Mobile based phones (WM5/WM6) which will cycle ur today background or theme after a set interval of time. It has a lot of features and options and you can even use it to achieve something other than changing wallpapers as well (e.g. running applications at set times) but that depends on your imagination.

Changes in this version:

1.53 - 23-March-08 -> RECOMMENDED UPDATE
i)Theme Color Detection has been improved a lot. Should work much more accurately now.

Hack: WordPress function ‘wp_list_pages’ to output page description (or other custom fields) in your page lists

Shantanu Goel

Disclaimer: I’m neither a WordPress guru nor a PHP expert. This is what it is, a dirtly little hack, otherwise I’d have called it an “enhancement” Smile

Now onto the main things.

Aim: You would have used wp_list_pages (or plugins like dd-list-subpages, that use it) to display a list of your pages/subpages on a particular page. e.g., I use it on my “Projects” pages hierarchy to list all the relevant projects under a particular heading. Now, the thing is that wp_list_pages gives you a lot of options to display things like dates, page title, page link, etc, but that’s not enough. I need to provide a small description for each page as well, to put things into perspective. Obviously, I don’t expect the visitors to go inside each link to see what it holds in store for them.