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-csv-to-opml

INTRODUCTION

This is a very simple script that I did for a friend. It can be used to quickly generate blogrolls.

Input: csv file with blog author names and blog links

Output: OPML file that can be imported into many blogging/blogrolling software and websites (e.g. wordpress, blogrolling.com, etc)

Usage:

shantz-csv-to-opml.pl <input file in csv format> <output opml filename>
Input File Format:
Each line should be like this:
<Name of Author>,<bloglink>,<bloglink>...
e.g.
Shantanu Goel, http://tech.shantanugoel.com, http://blog.shantanugoel.com

There can be any number of blogs for any author, if blogs are more than one, then multiple entries for that author will be made in opml file each indexed with increasing number like Shantanu Goel 1, Shantanu Goel 2, etc

Project: Retrieve Files From Remote Computer Through E-mail

I came across this post on lifehacker today (original post and solution here), which talks about a method of retrieving files from a remote computer through e-mail. Pretty archaic, I know, but again, it is a very simple method and works behind all the firewalls and stuff . But, the catch is that it is only for mac’s. Thought of creating something similar for the PC and mashed together some code during lunch time at office to make our dear old outlook remote-file-sending-capable.

Remote File Access Through E-Mail

Introduction:

This is a (proof-of-concept) outlook macro that you can use with an outlook rule to retrieve your files from your home/office PC by sending it a mail with a subject having a predefined special keyword and the body containing the names and paths of the files. The remote PC will then mail you the files on a predefined e-mail ID.

This project came into being after reading this post at lifehacker (original post and solution here). It listed a method to retrieve mails on your home/office PC by sending a “magic email” to it, but it was only for mac’s. Seeing that people wanted it for windows as well, I thought of making something up during lunch time at office.

Boring Meetings? CallJockey To The Rescue

Stuck in another boring meeting? You have a way out now, because connectivetools have released their app CallJockey, which can simulate fake incoming calls. What’s more, you can select the name, phone number or one of your saved contacts from whom the fake call will appear to be coming, plus you can define the time when you want it to ring. The only limitation is that it is available only for WM5 smarphones (WM6 Standard), i.e., windows mobile phones without a touchscreen.

Project: “shantz-wp-qotd “, My Wordpress Plugin, Updated to 1.1.0

For the uninitiated:

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.

I made a few additions / modifications to the code and the plugin has been updated to 1.1.0. The changes are:

  • Added Custom tag support for adding quotes anywhere in your posts/pages