Tony Byrne posted earlier this month about using community as a distinguishing characteristic during content management product selection.

A couple of colleagues and I were just talking about this earlier this week: Why do certain vendors make it so hard to find technical information on their products? The cynic in me says it is because they have something to hide. Product complexity. Complaining customers. Open support cases. Some vendors don’t want you to see that kind of stuff until after the deal closes. But does anyone really expect to find communities with 100% customer satisfaction and no open support cases?

I always thought IBM/Lotus did a great job with this and they still do. The old notes.net site is now under developerWorks. User forums are completely open. Technical documentation is freely-available. There are more learning resources than you can shake a stick at. And most are available without a login.

For open source, it goes without saying that the strength and openness of a community is an important factor in technology selection–without that you wouldn’t even think about implementing in production. In the closed-source world, I agree with Tony–for big vendors and small vendors alike, it makes sense to do some homework as part of your due diligence.

This is pretty well-known by now, but I haven’t blogged it yet: I’ve left Navigator Systems (now Hitachi Consulting). On Monday I start my new gig with Optaros and I couldn’t be more excited.

Leaving was one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever had to make. I started working for Navigator almost nine years ago as employee number twenty-five. During that time I worked with extremely sharp people on some of the best clients in Dallas (and a couple elsewhere).

Beyond the sharp people and the cool projects, Navigator was just a great place to work. The character of the leadership, the radically open communication, and highly collaborative environment were all critical cultural elements.

In the end, though, it was time to move on. Time to start a new chapter. And I’m pretty pumped about who I’ve chosen to write that chapter with. Optaros first caught my eye a year or so ago. I came across Seth Gottlieb’s blog and added it to my blogroll immediately. Seth heads up the ECM practice at Optaros so at the time I figured he’d have some really relevant insights to leverage as I built out my practice.

As a followed his posts (and upon talking to Seth in-person at a conference) I could tell Optaros was a company that potentially had many of the same cultural characteristics as Navigator. And with its focus on open source it was pretty hard to resist.

So, long story short, I start with Optaros on Monday. I’ll be working with Optaros’ local business development guy to grow Dallas and the surrounding geography, playing architect roles on multiple projects, and working with Seth and others on open source content management research, publications, and presentations.

I had my Xbox 360 on an 802.11g network. Unfortunately it was getting too much interference from my controllers and cordless phones to be able to consistently stream media from my Windows Media Center PC. Last weekend I added a new 802.11a access point (I double-checked that the Linksys router was listed as Xbox Live Compatible due to my earlier travails) and traded in the 802.11g wired-to-wireless bridge for the Xbox network adapter.

Right after I did it I was able to stream all evening without a single dropped frame. A couple of nights ago, though, it was a bit more spotty. I might have to fool with the router placement or something.

Ever since my home machine started collecting digital media I’ve wanted a robust way to stream that media from my study to my living room. Over the years I’ve tried a few different approaches, but none were exactly what I wanted. They were either too unreliable or too limited in functionality to be worth the trouble.

Last Fall I started reading previews on the XBox 360. It promised to be just what I was looking for–ease of use, wireless capability, and access to all of my rich media types.

While I waited for Microsoft to meet demand for the consoles my wife and I got hooked on our Windows Media Center PC. After having lived with it for four or five months now I can say it has exceeded our expectations. The only problem? Our study was the only place to view recorded content. (Although I have to admit, our Dell ultrasharp widescreen flat panel doesn’t have me in a hurry to return to the living room).

A couple of weeks ago I came across an XBox 360 core system at Best Buy. I was tempted to snag it–I had never actually seen one in real life and I had waited so long for this last piece in the media streaming puzzle. But I opted to wait for the pro bundle–the hard drive alone made it a better deal.

Last weekend I was in Oklahoma. Thinking maybe in Small Town America the demand for a high-priced gaming console wasn’t as great as it is in The Big City, I had my stepfather swing by the electronics section at Wal-Mart during one of his routine runs. Sure enough. XBox 360 Pro bundles a-plenty.

Back in Dallas I had a bit of trouble getting the wireless in place. As it turns out, the little USB adapter made specifically for the XBox 360 only works with a limited number of routers and bridges. I thought 802.11a/b/g was 802.11a/b/g but I guess not.

After repeated trips to Best Buy, CompUSA, and Circuit City, and committing the “supported hardware” list on xbox.com to memory, I finally settled on a config that seems to be working fine for now. I’ve got my original Belkin Pre-N router talking to a Linksys 802.11g gaming adapter.

I also snagged an XBox Universal Remote–it makes navigating the Media Center controls on the XBox much easier than using the wireless game controller. From a UI standpoint it is exactly the same as if I were sitting at the Media Center PC. This is a big plus, especially because that UI is so intuitive and visually appealing.

So now I’m streaming home movies, digital stills, music, and PVR’d television from my study to my living room. But saying that is the only thing I use the XBox 360 for is like saying one reads Playboy only for the articles. The XBox is, after all, primarily a gaming machine.

I’m no hardcore gamer, but it only took one session for me to become a Project Gotham Racing addict. The realism is unbelievable. I didn’t think I’d be into competing against others from around the world via XBox Live but it’s kind of a rush. And moving from computer opponents to humans is a sure way to keep the ego in check.

This little project wasn’t cheap and it may not be over. Depending on how much interference I get from the wireless controllers and normal use of my 802.11g network I may decide to put the XBox on its own 802.11a network. And, the whole thing has me thinking about upgrading the TV. But, at least for now, it works and I am thrilled.

I was tweaking the “dev tools” VMWare image today in an effort to get mail routing working. I had dropped Postfix on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 image but when it forwarded messages to our SMTP hub it acted like it was ignoring the “myorigin” config setting that told it to use only the domain name in the sender’s email address (rather than the fully-qualified host name).

Thanks to this thread, I was able to ascertain that it was probably a conflict with sendmail. Removing sendmail fixed the problem.

What was frustrating was that I got a couple of our Fedora Core 3 lab machines (non-virtual) working and they seemed to be able to coexist with sendmail just fine. I should have known to ignore that based on the different distro, sendmail, and postfix versions.

Every once-in-a-while we will do a project in-house (or in our “studio” as we call it) but most of the time we do our work on the client site. In our studio we can easily leverage our in-house development infrastructure: source code control, continuous builds, bug tracking, wiki, etc. When we go on-site we obviously try to leverage the tools our clients have in place. From time-to-time, though, the tools aren’t accessible or simply aren’t present.

What we needed was a way to take our studio development infrastructure with us. So, we created a VMWare image with our server-based development tools on it. Voila! Mobile studio. At the client site we simply install either the VMWare Player or the VMWare Server (both free) and we’re off to the races. Because we use freely-available software from the OS on up we can leave the infrastructure behind to be leveraged by the client development team without worrying about license concerns. It’s a good deal all around.

I began the transition from racquetball to squash this afternoon. One of the downsides of the Hitachi Consulting acquisition was that our Navigator-paid health club membership was no more. Unfortunately for a few of us regulars, there just aren’t that many courts around. The place Nav paid for was one of the few choices, but hard to justify with Christy already having a membership closer to home. So, I added on to Christy’s membership at Lifetime where squash is the only option.

My first stop was to a few sites to learn the rules (World Squash) and the difference between squash and racquetball.

First, the racquet. A racquetball racquet looks like a stubby tennis racquet. A squash racquet looks more like a badmitton racquet and has a smaller head. I was worried it would take some getting used to but the transition was very natural so no worries there.

Next, the ball. In racquetball, the livelier the ball, the better. In squash, apparently, the really good balls are extremely dead (In fact, I have no idea how you know when your squash ball has gone bad). The first time I dropped the squash ball on the court I knew I was in for something different. It hit the court with a thud, maybe bounced a half inch off the court and just sat there. A racquetball would have bounced about fifteen times, bounced out the door, and down the hall. The ball does get a bit more lively as it heats up during warm up and game play. A squash ball is significantly smaller but that didn’t bother me.

Balls are rated by their bounce. Double yellow dots indicate that the ball will need lots of action to get it going. See this site for more on ball ratings. Of course I thought “pro” was marketing speak for “our best ball” so that’s what I got. I don’t know if that’s what most beginners do. We’ll see.

Finally, the court. The court is smaller than a racquetball court but because you aren’t getting much bounce you’ll swear you are running the same amount if not more.

A squash court has several markings not present in a racquetball court. In racquetball you can serve anywhere between the two lines on the floor. Left side, right side, center, it doesn’t matter. After hitting the front wall, a serve can land anywhere in the back half of the court. During play, the ball has to hit the front wall but can hit any other side wall including the ceiling.

A squash court, on the other hand, has two designated areas from which your serve alternates. A served ball must hit the front wall (in a specific area, see “service line”, below) then land in the opposite quarter, like tennis. After the serve the rules are like racquetball except for the out lines which I’ll discuss shortly.

The part that takes more getting used to is the “tin”, the service line, and the “out” line. The tin is, literally, a piece of metal that runs across the bottom of the front wall. It’s OB. This is good for two reasons: First, anything hit that low could never be returned. Second, it eliminates the problem in racquetball when you have to rely on the “squeak” to know if the ball hit the floor first or the wall first. When a ball hits the tin you know it. The problem for us racquetballers is that a really low shot is a really great shot, usually, so I was whacking the tin with some regularity.

The service line runs across the front wall about halfway up. The serve has to hit the front wall above the service line but below the out line.

The out line runs around the entire court at varying heights. Anything on or above that line is also OB. That rules out ceiling shots, high shots off the side wall, and long lobs that come off the front wall and hit high on the back wall. But, again, because of the dynamics of the ball, we didn’t see too many balls hitting that high unless they were really bad shots.

See the World Squash court diagrams to get the picture.

I’ll miss racquetball. When I was really in the zone I felt like I had time to slow down and analyze the shot before making it–picture “bullet time” photography a la The Matrix. My racquetball mantra was always “patience”. Maybe once I settle in to the Zen of Squash I’ll be able to recapture that.

Today after hitting around a bit with Christy to get used to things I was able to pick up a game with a guy who plays regularly. I was happy to find it was every bit as physically and mentally challenging as racquetball. (And I was happy to see that some of my racquetball skills were still put to good use–he didn’t skunk me).

One thing that killed me was corner shots. In racquetball if someone puts it in the corner you can usually dig it out because there’s enough bounce left for you to get under it. In squash maybe good players can dig out a corner shot but I found that if I let him get to the corner I was dead. Another was the back wall. Hitting off the backwall is a common racquetball shot. A successful back wall shot is more geometry than muscle. In squash you’ve really got to crank it to have a hope. I never saw my opponent try it. I tried several times out of habit and never came close.

So there’s another acquisition transition item taken care of. On to the next one.

FastCompany is reporting that Netflix slows down service to their most frequent renters.

It’s the only event I’ve managed to watch this Olympics and it hasn’t disappointed.