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. We have two incredible boys, Darren and Alex. 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:

• Printed the Simpson's monkey to a character LCD
• Made this website using reStructured text for all of the pages.
• Created family photo albums using Gallerie.
• Mapped future Houston METRORail light rail lines on Google Earth (KMZ file).
• Designed a mixed-use community for the former AstroWorld property (SketchUp 6).

And one more thing. . .

I Switched to Apple Macintosh in March of 2003. My old PowerBook G4 12" lasted from 2003 to 2009. Now I'm using a Mac Mini as my primary computer.

Here are my top 3 features of a Mac:

1. Unix-based means the OS is very secure and I can run all sorts of open-source software.
2. Time Machine makes complete HDD backup and restore very easy.
3. The built-in software--specifically iTunes and iPhoto--is excellent. And I can get free software for all of my other software needs.

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.