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: 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.

Windows Mobile: Missed Call Made Easy (Indian Cell Owners Rejoice)

Shantanu Goel

Perdida = Missed Call (in Spanish)

Missed Call = Ubiquitous Necessity (atleast in India)

Enter: cPerdidas -> A Windows Mobile program (works with WM5 as well as WM6) that will allow you to make missed calls to anyone you desire. Just config your country code, select the contact and “Hacer Perdida!” (Make the missed call) and your contact will get the missed call on his device. The only change is that the program will cut the call even before he can hear his phone ring. So, whenever he looks at his phone, he’ll know that you called. Hmmm, pretty useful for times when you just want to send your loved one a note that you missed them, without disturbing him/her in a meeting and, of course, without spending a penny, or waiting with your fingers clenched onto to End button tighter than a F1 driver’s fingers on the pit lane speed limiter.

Project: Shantz Copy Basket (Compatible with linux as well as windows)

Shantanu Goel

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.

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: