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ITIL: Incident Management March 9, 2006

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So, the Service Desk has been setup. Now it’s time to give them some work to do :) First and primary aspect, is Incident Management (and it’s important to distinguish Incident Management from Problem Management – that comes next).

Essential Activities of the Incident Management Process & Function:

Incident Management provides the following Benefits to the Organization:

and has the following (potential) challenges:

Some Key Performance Indicators that could be used to monitor and manage the Incident Management function are:

Incident Management is one of those areas where “the rubber meets the road” – if you don’t have these processes nailed down, failures, both actual and perceived, can spiral outwards. Personnel assigned to Incident Management, within the Service Desk function, are very much the face of your support organization.

(the above is part of an ongoing series of notes I’m making as I review the ITIL processes I currently work to in my “day job”. Other notes can be found by browsing the ITIL category here).

And we’re back… March 9, 2006

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A little busy in the day job, followed by a few days sickness, led to the recent dearth of substantive posts here.  “Normal service is resuming”.  Coming up, maybe some iPod stuff, definately some more ITIL notes, and who knows what else.  Thanks for reading.

links for 2006-03-07 March 6, 2006

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links for 2006-03-04 March 3, 2006

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RIM vs NTP – It’s Over March 3, 2006

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Just saw a Computerworld bulletin, and it seems that this is over and done with:

According to NTP, the deal covers all current NTP patents involved in the litigation as well as future NTP patents. “All of RIM’s past and future products, services and technologies will be covered as well as all RIM customers and providers of RIM products and services, including wireless carriers, distributors, suppliers and ISV partners,” NTP said in a statement. “The agreement permits RIM and its partners to sell its products, services and infrastructure completely free and clear of any claim by NTP….”

Final cost?  $612.5 million.

Guess I can update my timeline later on and then stop thinking about this!

New iPod Time… Fun Getting Videos To Play March 1, 2006

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Black iPod I waited until the Apple “Special Event” happened yesterday before buying an iPod – a “proper” video model would have been nice, as that’s going to be my primary use for it, above and beyond music, but hey, this does the job. Both Katy and Ant made comments in the “This Week…” post, regarding the black iPod vs. the white one; I think I was already leaning towards the black one anyway, so that was easy. It’s disappointing that the “official” accessories are still primarily white, though. I imagine I’ll go hunting eventually, and get the co-ordinated stuff, but I was in a one-stop-shop mode yesterday, so my shiny new black iPod also has shiny white a/v cables, a universal dock, and a camera attachment. Ah well.

I like the looks of the new Mac Mini too… I could be tempted to put one of those in my lounge as a media system – not media necessarily in the “Windows Media Center Edition” sense, as I don’t need a tuner, etc., but media as in a dedicated, quiet, low-profile system to run iTunes and so forth. Have to do some thinking, and see how the initial reviews on it turn out… It’s all HP’s fault – they gave me an iPod shuffle as a giveaway a while back, and slowly, more and more Apple gear is creeping into my home and life.

A “customer comment” note, however – Apple, whoever decided to use something in the order of two-point text for the serial number on the back of the iPod… Thanks. Thanks a lot. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed finding something to magnify the text with, and then dealing with the reflective back surface of the iPod while trying to read that serial number… I can’t tell you how much fun that was! (I know, sarcasm is low humor. Sometimes I can’t help it!).

After setting up the iPod, I dropped a couple of video files over to it, using 3GP_Converter, as pointed out to me by Ant, here. I immediately realised that I was having the problem he then talks about, but unlike him, I didn’t have an older version of firmware to downgrade to. Hmmm… Anyway, thanks to the posts over at iLounge here, and the more organized sticky-thread I went with the general view that this wasn’t really a bug, but more a change in acceptable tolerances for MPEG wrappers. So, off to find software that would convert my existing AVI files and so forth. And free is always good.

I ended up using Videora (that’s a direct link to the EXE, folks) after reading the PSP 9 forums. Initial testing looks good, taking about 15 minutes per one hour AVI recording. Still figuring out the “best” settings for the program, but the main point is that I can now readily drop video to the iPod again, and the sound doesn’t drop off after thirty seconds.

‘course, simple as all that above sounds, it happened after I’d spent a couple of hours trying different ways to get the 1.1 firmware to play the 3GP_Converter generated files. I’ve now got an iPod called “IPOD” on my computer, and I’ll have to go googling later to figure out how to change that.