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.

Nokia + Windows Mobile = Let’s Kick Some Butt

As everyone knows, I’m an out-and-out Windows Mobile worshipper. It’s like a girlfriend, who is very difficult to manage and understand at first, but is a great source of joy if you know how to manage her. I don’t like any other phones now; the extensibility given by WM will do that to you.

I also “admire” Nokia because of the quality and reliability they provide with their phones. Having worked for them in a project (Nokia Networks/Nokia Seimens Networks actually), I know how much testing they put in before releasing something. That coupled with the recent crap-doings by even the largest of the WM Phone companies like HTC, have made me try to look elsewhere.

Tips: Configure FTP upload support for wordpress in Blogjet

A few days ago, I had written about a wonderful blogging tool Blogjet. Now, if you host a wordpress blog, you’d be aware of the fact that for wordpress to be able to upload yor files (images, attachements in post etc) to the server, you have to make the upload directory writable by all. Now, this is a BIG security risk. Some people go to the lengths of CHMOD’ding their upload directory for a short while and after upload, restoring the apt file permissions back. Some upload their files separately through ftp. But Blogjet has a very cool feature. It supports uploading all your non-text content to your webspace not only by using wordpress APIs but also through ftp if wordpress doesn’t have necessary permissions to write files on your server. This saves you a lot of time, that you can then devote on writing the actual post instead of meandering around with the “technicalities”. But many a people have a heart-ache configuring the ftp with Blogjet, although it is quite simple really. This is basically due to conflicting and confusing instructions existing on the ‘net. So, here I present to you step by step, simplest instrutions to configure this. Read on.

i3theme awesomeness: Cool feature for end-users/viewers

I am just in love with this theme. I knew about the cool feature that you can click on those little green dots on the right top corner of any widget and the widget will minimize to just a bar but just now discovered another awesome feature for the viewers of the wordpress based blogs using this theme. The feature is that you, the viewer, can reorganize the widgets on the left and right sidebars according to your preference, like move the “Pages” widget towards the top for convenient navigation through all the static pages in the site. All this through simple steps like -“Click, drag, drop” and you are set. The other widgets will automatically move up and down to make space. And the clincher is that it will remember your preferences (actually the browser will remember, I think). So, whenever you come back to the site, you will see it the way you like it. Here is an example:

Hack: Wordpress i3theme IE6 sidebar problem solved

The awesome i3theme that this blog uses is a treat to the eyes, except to a lot of IE6 users. The issue is that for many people viewing wordpress blogs using this theme, the right sidebar doesn’t appear on the right, but below the middle column main area.

I didn’t know this problem existed as I don’t use IE but when a friend mailed to let me know, I started hunting around for the solution. Infact, found on the home page of i3theme, that the author acknowledged this bug and fixed it in v1.5, except the fact, that the fix doesn’t work. Because this blog was also using the same version.

Project: ShantzTodayChanger (Windows Mobile Tool To Cycle Themes/Wallpapers Automatically)

ShantzTodayChanger Config Screenshot

The newly launched [“Projects”] section is hereby inaugarated with a Windows Mobile Tool developed by me, called “[ShantzTodayChanger]”. This is a little tool for your Windows Mobile based phones (Compatible with WM5/WM6 but not WM2003) which will cycle ur today background or theme after a set interval of time. It has a lot of features and options that you can discover by reading the text below. And you can even use this options to achieve something other than changing wallpapers as well but that depends on your imagination. !