Introduction

Hi, I'm Dean. Here's a brief history of me. I was born and raised in the suburbs of Kansas City, on the Kansas side. In high school, I studied, ran the 800 M and played soccer.

I started Kansas State University in the Fall of 1992 (a.k.a. The First Bill Snyder Era). I'm a loyal alumnus and a BIG fan of K-State Volleyball. I graduated with a Masters's degree in Computer Engineering in 1999.

I worked at Motorola in Austin, TX from 1999 to 2006. I was a software engineer on the team that ported J2ME to Motorola handsets and made or ported the embedded Linux device drivers for Motorola's iDEN mobile handsets sold by Sprint/Nextel.

I married Ara (Schlaman) in 2000. She graduated UT-Houston med school in 2006 and we are there for her residency as well. Our first child, Darren, was born in December of 2006. Pictures and Videos are available.

If you want to get a hold of me, reverse the following: moc.liamg@652llahwd

Tech Projects

I enjoy spending my spare time hacking on microcontrollers, robots and software. My languages of choice are Python, C and assembly for high, medium and low-level programming, respectively. Here is a list of my top projects:

The Python-on-a-Chip project consists of the PyMite virtual machine, ports to specific platforms, libraries, tests, tools and documentation. PyMite is a flyweight Python bytecode interpreter written from scratch to execute in low memory on microcontrollers without an operating system. PyMite supports a subset of Python 2.5 and can also be compiled, tested and executed on a desktop computer.

MMB103 (seen to the right) is an Atmel ATmega103 microcontroller board for hobby robotics. I designed it and wrote software libraries for it. It is the size of a business card and runs my small robot, Snaggletooth.

Robotics is my number one tech hobby. Since moving to Houston, I've joined SHARP and started a new robot called Argonaut. I also have a number of past robots that were mostly made in college.

Miscellaneous smaller projects include:

• Printing the Simpson's monkey to a character LCD
• This website is made using reStructured text for all of the pages.
• Darren's photo albums are created by Gallerie.

And one more thing. . .

I Switched to Apple Macintosh in March of 2003. I got a PowerBook G4 12" and I'm still using it as my primary computer. It's the best computer I've ever owned.

The only thing that has gone wrong has been two hard drive failures, both my fault. The first was due to me accidently setting a GPS device on the keyboard (and in the GPS device was a powerful magnet). Click, click, click, SCRAAAAATCH. Dead.

The second HDD failure was due to me dropping the Powerbook from waist-high to the tile kitchen floor. The aluminum casing suffered a dent and the HDD croaked, but everything else keeps right on running.

I replaced my HDDs myself and with Mac OS X's Time Machine, my data is safely backed up to an external HDD.

If you've ever been frustrated with Windows PCs for any reason or you are looking for the best Unix-based personal computer, I highly recommend Apple Macintosh.