Bob DuCharme
bobsnee.com                      CSS based on design by Gururaj. 
 
 
 
This is my old home page. My current one is at bobdc.com, and Changing my blog's domain name and platform is a blog entry about the transition.
 
 

shameless plugs

Album Gin & Heptatonic by my band The Heptatonic Jazz Quintet.

buy my books:

Latest: Learning SPARQL from O'Reilly.

XSLT Quickly from Manning Publications.

XML: The Annotated Specification from Prentice Hall. The definitive reference on the most important XML document of them all: the official XML Specification.

free "books"

Free epub children's picture books These were developed with the OLPC XO laptop in mind, but any epub-compliant eBook reader will read them.

Logo for Kids I was thinking about writing an introduction to programming for middle school kids using the Logo programming language. After writing about 90 pages and deciding not to pursue it, I've made an Acrobat file of what I did do available for anyone who can use it.

Operating Systems Handbook Wouldn't "Working knowledge of UNIX, VMS, OS/400, VM/CMS, and MVS" look great on your resume? Formerly a $49.50 hardcover from McGraw-Hill; now a set of Acrobat files free for you to download!

miscellaneous

datascienceglossary.org, a site I maintain

Why snee.com?

rdfdata.org: A directory of publicly available collections of RDF and web services that return RDF.

XSLT 2.0 articles: XML.com has a complete list of my Transforming XML columns about XSLT; for people interested in learning about XSLT 2.0, I've created a separate list showing just the articles covering the new features and other issues.

Some feedback.

Microdata tests: Potrzebie Moses Schliessen Fangio

Recent Tweets

Recently on bobdc.blog

My wife Jennifer and our two daughters and I live in Ivy, Virginia, just west of Charlottesville, Virginia.

See more pictures on my flickr page, especially the family pictures page. I also have a page of panoramic pictures.


2004 Christmas card photo session (animated).

At the Albemarle Country Fair, September 5, 2004.

With Kid. All very pensive. 11/03.

Little movies! Click an image to see 7/03 Oxford playground fun.

Still pictures: click a thumbnail picture to see a bigger version.

7/03: At Edinburgh Castle and at a photography museum near it. (After that picture had been on this web page for five months, I learned of mirrorproject.com and contributed this to it. (More mirrorproject contributions: March 2004, May 2004, and July 2005.)

On a bungee-trampoline contraption in Edinburgh and at a playground in Oxford shortly after, with some image enhancements by my brother Peter, who just loves those Blue Note album covers.

4/2002: Jennifer and me at the Theremin.

Jennifer at the Theremin Bob at the Theremin

2001 pictures.

soccer picture ready for dance recital on horse in orange sweatshirt 2001 Christmas card picture

In Jeff Van Nostrand's studio with his son Parker, February 2001.

at piano Drums 1 Drums 2

Oxford, England, July of 2000.

Oxford, 7/00

(M + A) * 6

May 1999, what my brother did with a digital camera, our daughters, and Photoshop. (He's a big Mac guy.)

I wrote a lot about XML and RDF for various publications back when there were publications that would pay for it. Now I mostly just write for my blog.

Some things I wrote:

Good Introductions to XML

The SGML/XML Web Page is the ultimate reference on all that's available in the world of XML and SGML. (Note that it's searchable.)

"The elements be kind to thee, and make thy spirits all of comfort!"
Anthony and Cleopatra, III ii

I work at CCRi, a research company specializing in machine learning and analytics (especially geospatial analytics) in Charlottesville. My work email address is bducharme@ their domain name.

I have a BA in religion from Columbia University and received my masters in computer science from New York University's Courant Institute in the spring of 1996.

Three papers I wrote in pursuit of my masters (note that they have an outdated e-mail address under their titles in the Acrobat versions):

I wrote "Object-Oriented Development of SGML Applications" (48K Acrobat file) as part of an independent study project in the spring of 1993 to analyze the benefits that current OO literature could offer to SGML developers. Although the general ideas about OO-SGML correspondence in the paper have been superceded by the tremendous work done on groves and property sets and the Document Object Model since then, I'm still proud of the Smalltalk program that I wrote to demonstrate the paper's ideas. It reads a DTD, declares classes for each element type, and then reads the output of James Clark's nsgmls, instantiating each element to the appropriate class. It also reads formatting scripts to convert instantiated objects of simple HTML and TEI documents to RTF and TeX.

The paper was aimed at people (for example, project adviser Professor Ed Schonberg) who knew more about OO technology than about SGML. I presented a shorter, revised version of the paper for people who knew more about SGML than OO technology at SGML '95 in Boston, and the QUE Book "Using SGML" included a much dumbed-down version of the SGML '95 paper as its last chapter. Talk about repurposing your content.

In the fall semester of 1993, I wrote the paper "Increasing Concurrency in Object-Oriented Databases Using Semantic Information: A Survey" (64K Acrobat file) for Dennis Shasha's "Advanced Databases" course. This paper analyzed three others that explored ways to use the semantic information stored in an OO database to minimize the situations where one process must be held up until another is finished. (An RDBMS example would be blocking the update of a particular record until another update of that record had completed.) As per the assignment, the paper includes four discussion questions and answers at the end.

In the spring of 1996, I submitted the paper "solfish: Generating Text from an Existing Grammar" (17K Acrobat file) for Ralph Grishman's "Natural Language Processing" course. It used an extensive natural language parsing system written at NYU in Allegro Common Lisp with a domain of course registration so that users could enter English assertions and queries about students and course registration. I wrote a LISP program to randomly generate sentences from this grammar with the stated purpose of calling attention to weaknesses in the encoded grammar by generating sentences considered correct by that grammar but incorrect by a human proofreader. The other purpose was just for fun--to see what kinds of sentences it would generate, especially after the system's vocabulary was augmented with some more poetic vocabulary entries. (Sample output: "Her hazy ghosts only eat with fish. Ghosts fish often with moons. Fish mean to think. Zombie eggs generally sleep.")

See The Postmodernism Generator (start with the notes at the bottom before you try to read the actual essay you see) for a more recent, much more sophisticated application of the same principle.
with bass

The Snee Group was going to be a parody of a corporate web site that Bob DuCharme and his brother Peter (a.k.a. The Master Cylinder) never had time to properly finish. ("The Snee Group: When Rightsizing Isn't Enough.") The name was inspired by Dr. Seuss's On Beyond Zebra, for which Seuss made up 26 letters after "Z," including Snee. (Back when the artist currently known as Prince was known as "the artist formerly known as Prince," the glyph he used to express this mouthful clearly showed a strong "On Beyond Zebra" influence.) The beauty of the name "The Snee Group" is the ready made logo. It even has its own Unicode code point: U+E637.

When Bob and Peter wanted a short, easy-to-spell domain name where the dot com wasn't taken, they used snee. It turns out that it's a Dutch surname, so they get mail from snees asking about it. Some people say "Snee! Like in Peter Pan!" but actually that's Mr. Smee. See The World of Snee for more.

2006-05-13 Eus Ferdinand writes (after finding The Operating Systems Handbook while doing some research on VM):

snee is not only a dutch surname. Actually, if you would ask somebody in this country what a snee was, you would at least be treated suspiciously.

Cut: Among other things, a cut is something that has a line shape as a result of an action with let's say a knife. If you cut yourself in your hand with a knife, you have "a cut in your hand". If you say "I have a cut in my hand" in Dutch you would say "Ik heb een snee in mijn hand". But if you actually say this, it means is that you must have your hand in a woman's underwear. In Dutch the street-word for vagina is "kut", which should at least sound familiair to you. The word "kut" is very frequently used. We use this word for quality purposes as well: kut-film (cut-film (not film cut which is something else)), kut-ding (cut-thing), kut-school (cut-school). But when the English mean a kut they will not say "cut" but "cunt". I'm pretty sure that snee.com is frequently checked by triple-x companies in The Netherlands. So, a kut is a snee which is a cut. Fascinating.......

I've heard that people in the porn industry pay big money for domain names—deze domeinnaam is te koop! I'm happy to accept euros.

Full-length books

Shorter form publications, which mostly cover semantic web and XML-related topics, are listed on this page, and see also Bob's weblog.

[Learning SPARQL cover]

My most recent book is Learning SPARQL from O'Reilly Media. It introduces the reader to the W3C standard for querying Linked Data and the semantic web.
[XSLT Quickly cover]

XSLT Quickly from Manning Publications is a guide to learning the most important parts of XSLT, the W3C standard for transforming a set of XML into something else, and putting those parts to use with minimal time and effort.
[Ann. Spec book cover]

XML: The Annotated Specification was published by Prentice Hall PTR. It's an annotated version of the W3C XML Recommendation, with explanations and examples provided throughout the entire specification, including the appendixes.
[SGML CD book cover]

SGML CD, published by Prentice Hall PTR, is a tutorial and users guide to free SGML software that includes a CD of the software covered. It was originally going to be called "SGML for Free," but the folks at Prentice Hall thought that playing up the included CD would sell more copies of the book. You can download an Acrobat version of the complete Emacs/PSGML chapter from the book's web page.
[Operating Systems Handbook cover]

My proposed title for The Operating Systems Handbook was "Fake Your Way Through Minis and Mainframes," but McGraw-Hill Professional Books wanted something that sounded more, well, professional. The book provides a crash course in using UNIX, VMS, OS/400, VM/CMS, and MVS. It was a $49.50 hardcover from McGraw-Hill but is now available as a set of downloadable PDF files.