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.

Shantz Copy Basket

Shantanu Goel

Introduction:

I’m sure you have copied/moved files on your computer from one place to another. And I’m sure often you have to do more than just “single-shot” copying that is copy a few files to one place, move a few to another, and copy yet some more to one more location. Well, I had to do this quite a few times (e.g. I ran out of disk space recently on a partition and had to empty out my “Movies” and “Songs” folders to move a few movies/songs each to all other partitions/disks according to the space available). Hence, I wrote this little command line program, which behaves like a basket.

Project: shantz-wp-qotd and shantz-wp-prefix-suffix updated

Shantanu Goel

Just some news on my WordPress plugins front. shantz-wp-qotd has been updated to version 1.2.1 and shantz-wp-prefix-suffix has been updated to 1.0.1. It is just a minor update meant for people still using a WordPress version < 2.1. The update makes the “page exclusion” feature of both the plugins (i.e. the option to prevent the plugins from acting on “pages”) compatible with WP < 2.1 as well.

Go to their respective pages for downloads:

Caution: “Network Solutions”, Stay As Far As Possible

Shantanu Goel

If you had a dream of starting your own website, your online abode, and you wanted to see whether the pretty little name for your dream house is available or not, what do you do? Check its availability on one of the many domain sellers’ sites. And if you picked “Network Solutions” to do the search, then you have just been scammed my dear friend.

Did you wonder, that though Network Solutions showed the domain name as available, but yet when you searched and found a cheaper registrar, the domain name was suddenly…GONE..What about the second one you had searched for at NetSol? Gone. Third One? Gone. Now, what is the probability of all 3 names being registered within 5 minutes of you searching for them? Probably one in a billion. No, its one in one (100%) if you searched on Network Solutions, as a friend of mine found out the hard way.

Chinese LionKing800 cellphone claims 1-year standby

Shantanu Goel

Even though they are using a battery with 10 times the juice of a normal one, but still the claim is impressive on 2 counts acc to me:

  1. The size of the battery “seems” to be not that big for having 10 times the mAs.

  2. Even with this battery, 1 year of standby and 3 days of talk time is impressive.

But one term spoils it all for me, “vaporware”, anyone? Check out more details at Engadget Mobile.

Indian Govt. vs Blackberry: Yet Another Example of Idiocy From Our “Leaders”

Shantanu Goel

Just read on BGR, that RIM will have to close down its BlackBerry service in India if they don’t allow our government to snoop on every little piece of data that goes through it. WTF? On an even more serious note, if they do comply, then will the same demand be made to all the ISPs? I just shudder at the mere thought of this…Quotin BGR below

It looks as if the Indian government is not content with its inability to decrypt their citizens BlackBerry e-mails, and is threatening a shutdown of Research In Motion’s devices in the country as punishment. Business Standard reports that the Indian government desires access to RIM’s proprietary e-mail network, in order to monitor e-mails being sent and received through the country. It is reported that a meeting will take place on March 14th, involving RIM representatives, members of wireless companies within the country, and representatives of the Indian government.