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 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 Here is my public key (PEM file) if you want to send me encrypted email.

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:

PyMite is a flyweight Python interpreter written from scratch to execute on 8-bit and larger microcontrollers with resources as limited as 64 KiB of program memory (flash) and 4 KiB of RAM. PyMite supports a subset of the Python syntax and can execute a subset of the Python bytecodes. PyMite can also be compiled, tested and executed on a desktop computer.

UsbProg-SHARP is a reprogrammable, multi-purpose USB device. I took the open source design of the UsbProg and made a few additions and changes to the circuit. I made a new single-sided layout so my fellow SHARP members and I could etch our own boards.

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.

Music

Here are some of my favorite songs from SXSW 2005. Yes, 2005 is getting kind of old, but I haven't filtered through the songs from 2006-2008 yet.

And one more thing. . .

I Switched to Apple Macintosh in March of 2003. I got a 12" G4 PowerBook. It's the best computer I've ever owned.

I'm not one of those preacher types, but I do know the difference between a good computer and a bad computer. I've used the following as my primary computer over the years: an IBM PC (original, dual floppy), a Northgate 286-16, a Gateway 486-33, a Zenon P-90 clone, a Compaq P-II 300 with firewire and 15" LCD display, and an IBM Thinkpad. I've used DOS, nearly every flavor of MS-Windows from 2.0 up, OS/2, BeOS and Linux.

Even with my extensive IBM/MS/Intel/PC history, I can easily state that my PowerBook G4 12" beats all those other computers in every metric I can conceive: data throughput, durability, security, stability, portability, elegance, usability, endurance, utility, intuitiveness, appearance, functionality, aluminumness. . .

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.