John Wargo

Although I'm a BlackBerry guy at heart, I've always been interested in Android. As I see it (from reading analyst reports and the press) Android is going to make a very big splash in the Enterprise mobility market in 2010 and 2011. Considering Android (like BlackBerry) was built from the ground up with Enterprise Mobility in mind (unlike the iPhone) it's likely that BlackBErry and Android will become the dominant players in the enterprise by 2012 (which has been predicted by the analyst community). Being an employee of AT&T I was excited to finally see the official announcement about the Android-based phones I will have access to. See the press release.

I've been studying up on Android development in preparation for Lotusphere. I'm going to be demonstrating how to build a BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and hopefully Android rich client application (not the browser) accessing a Domino application in my session (AD114). I have a new laptop to configure and get ready for the conference, but I hope I have the time to add the Android example to my demos.

I can't wait to get one or more Android devices in my hot little hands so I can finally play with the platform at length. I'll be sure to write about it as I know more.

Back when the US FCC was auctioning off the 700 MHz specturm to mobile carriers and Google announced its intention to bid I was sure that Google was about to for a dramatic change in the wireless industry. With their building the Android platform, buying up of all that dark fiber, building data centers along river banks (for cooling and power generation) in the Dakotas and building those shipping container data centers they were supposed to put at the Internet's major access points - I was sure they were going to set themselves up to compete with the existing carriers and force a change in the way the US wireless carriers did business.

What I imagined was Google setting themselves up as a wireless provider using the 700 MHz spectrum I was sure they were going to buy then offering essentially free devices in return for the ability to run local ads across a dedicated portion of the device screen. Anyone would be able to walk into a Best Buy or WalMart, plunk down $50 or $100 and have essentially a device with free wireless network access. When they pulled out of the auction I wasn't quite sure what they were all about and I'm still not sure.

When all of that press generated a few weeks ago about the proposed Nexus One device - a mobile device Google would sell direct - I was certain it was all bunk. That they just wouldn't try to go direct like that. Well, Google made the announcement today: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2357687,00.asp. With this new device, people will be able to plunk down the full price for the device and get an unlocked device they can use on any compitable network (just like I believe you can in Europe and other parts of the world). Once I walked into a carrier sales center with a device I already owned and only had to pay a monthly fee for service (no contract) I promised myself that I'd never do anything but purchase the device at full price and use any carrier I wanted. Now Google is making it so it's very easy for me to do this. No begging your carrier to allow you to unlock it - just buy an unlocked phone directly from the manufacturer and do whatever you want with it.

It's going to be very interesting to see what impact this is going to have on the US Wireless Carrier market.

My wife and I sold our house on Christmas Eve and purchased a new one on New Year's Eve. Wild times this holiday season I can tell ya. On top of that I contracted H1N1 and Pneumonia - I can't tell you how much fun that was.

One of the things we've been talking about is whether we're going to order landline(s) for the new house. My wife and I both have mobile phones of course and our kids don't get phone calls but by the time they do, they'll probably have their own mobile numbers. I've always argued with my wife about having wired phones in the house (I'm OK with cordless phones, but wanted at least one wired phone in case of a power outage). I won that argument after a huge winter storm knocked out power for a few days and she was able to call people because I had the necessary wired phones available to her. It's always fun to be right....

Anyway, since I work for AT&T now and get pretty good pricing on phone lines, I decided that even though the trend was to go completely wireless rather than installing landlines that I'd get one anyway (actually three - home, home office and one for McNelly SoftWorks) just because it would be very convenient. The house we purchased is 11 years old, so it still hase RJ-11 jacks everywhere. Not sure that would be the case in any new house I purchase/build in the next couple of years. So, for this house we're installing landlines expecting that not to be the case for the next one.

I was looking through the press the other day and found the following article: AT&T wants the FCC's blessing to shut down PSTN which indicates that AT&T (the number one provider of Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) in the United States) has begun lobbying the FCC to allow it to shut down the landline telephone service. It makes sense, everyone nowadays is using their mobile phone as their primary phone numbers; any kid coming out of college will have one number and will never install a landline in any apartment or house. It won't be very long before landlines become more and more expensive because less and less people are using them. What does it mean for businesses?

Even though consumers aren't using landline phones anymore - how does a business have a phone number if AT&T is shutting down the analog Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)? Of course everything switches to the broadband netywork. We'll all be using VOIP I expect and companies and old guys like me will be getting their POTS line through my high-speed broadband connection running into the house. I expect service will be the same, but it will require more hardware I expect and an ever bigger load on the broadband connection.

I expect it would relieve a huge burden if AT&T didn't have to maintain both PSTN and broadband networks. Getting rid of the analog network would allow them to dedicate much more money toward providing better broadband and wireless service. I wonder how long it will take them to get approval and to get the network shut down. 10 years? 20 years? 50 years?

What I'm interesting in seeing is when the wireless carriers finally get their act together and allow VOIP for mobile calls as well - how cool would it be if I could get my personal number and my business number ringing on the same mobile device? It's a smartphone, right? Should be smart enough to do that. 

Time will tell...

I read a lot of computer books and application development books – you’d have to expect that considering what I do for a living. Recently I’ve been catching up on some of my Joomla! books and of course reading the BlackBerry development books that followed mine and there’s something that always bothers me in these types of books and I thought I’d rant about it a little bit…

In most development books, the authors always use ‘foo’, ‘bar’ and/or ‘foobar’ as sample function names in their sample code. What I can never tell is whether the person using those terms understands what they’re doing or whether someone did it once and everyone else just followed.

Let me give you some background:

A very long time ago (who knows how far back – Wikipedia says it was in 1944) some army grunt used the term ‘FUBAR’ to describe something that was ‘mucked up beyond all recognition’ or ‘mucked up beyond all repair’ (depending on which version of the story you hear) substituting an ‘F’ for the ‘M’ in mucked of course. The term was apparently very widely used in the US army (or so my father told me from his experiences in the Korean War).

What I can’t figure out is how the term got mangled into something that’s used so often in computer books. The term is clearly not something that you’d expect to people to use in a book, so I guess that’s how it became foobar instead of FUBAR. Probably mostly because it would be too easy to mispronounce ‘fu’ as perhaps fuh instead of foo – so that’s why ‘they’ made it ‘foo’? Anyway, why is this being used? I’m not offended by the term, but it is a crude and impolite word to use in a regular, every day book.

If you read the Wikipedia reference for FUBAR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fubar and foobar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar, the writers there have clearly tried to pretend that the words are not related (confusingly the FUBAR page says they’re not related: ‘Not to be confused with foobar’ but the foobar page mentions that foobar may actually be related to FUBAR). How could they not be referring to the same word? Some developer geek heard about the expression and started using it in his sample code and before we know it, it’s being used everywhere. Why can’t the sample function names be something like ‘function1’ & ‘function2’ or ‘somefunction’ & ‘anotherfunction’ instead of ‘foo’ and ‘bar’? It just doesn’t make sense to me.

The reason this all came to mind I guess was that many people use words like this without really knowing what they’re saying. I purchased much of the furniture in my house from a family run furniture company in Amish country (although they were not an Amish family – just craftsmen living in Amish country). I was speaking to the owner’s wife about a misconnection on a delivery to my house when she said “I’m so sorry about the SNAFU.” I was completely taken by surprise by her comment – she was after all a quiet, polite lady in her late 50’s or early 60’s. I laughed for a minute then asked her if she knew what SNAFU meant. When she said that she didn’t, I told her that that expression was another Army term standing for ‘Situation Normal, All Mucked Up’ (or course again substituting an ‘F’ for the ‘M’ in mucked). She was shocked and stunned and quickly promised “I’ll never use that term again!”

Anyway, feel free to disagree with me, but I’m certain the initial use of foobar in computer sample code was a sort of trick played by some geek a long time ago and we’re stuck with it in every new computer book that comes out. I wish people would drop it – again, it’s not that I’m offended by it, I just think it’s stupid to have that expression (although a slightly modified one) used in professionally produced books. I wish the editors would all get together and ban that term from all code examples in computer books going forward. I promise that you won’t find the expression in BlackBerry Development Fundamentals and in any other book I write!