The Visible OPS Handbook

ITIL is a “collection of bThe Visible Ops Handbook Imageest practices codified in seven books by the Office of Government Commerce in the U.K.”

Visible Ops is a collection of best practices organized into four incremental steps.

Phase 1 – The primary goal is stabilizing the current infrastructure. In order to do this first the identification of the most critical IT systems is to be performed, followed by restricting the change access to these systems and ensuring that each change to these systems is viewed as potentially most impacting. This will also involve creating Change Advisory Boards and a Change Request Tracking System. The ultimate goal is to do more proactive work and reduce the Mean Time To Recover (MTTR). At the end of this phase there is a general increase in the confidence level in the IT systems.

Phase 2 – During phase 2 the focus is on identifying the most critical IT components (s/w & h/w), interdependencies between them and then prioritizing the most critical services.

Phase 3 – Release engineering as an essential component and a standard and quick deployment process is being looked at in this stage. Essentially the most experienced team members needs to be pulled out and their focus and attention diverted to the release engineering tasks and the relatively inexperienced people left in for firefighting.

Phase 4 – The final phase is the Continual Improvement. Here the goals are to improve the change success rate and increase the effective rate of change followed by continuous monitoring to measure any potential slip in performance.

If you just want a gist of ITIL, this is the book you want to go for. Based on the 4 steps provided in the book, it will become a lot easier for implementing ITIL in an organization.

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Sidney Sheldon’s Angel of the Dark

Sidney Sheldon's Angel of the Dark ImageThe book started with the murder of a rich old man and the brutal rape of his young wife. The police investigations reached no where and then the young wife, one of the victims, vanished. Thus forcing LAPD to close down the case and forcing the detective to resign.

All was seemingly set when the detective, now married and settled in france as an interpol investigator got a call about the murder.

And then there were a series of similar murders unearthed.

After some pages we could guess who the killers are, but still the book keeps you glued because the intention behind these murders is not yet clear. And to be honest, towards the end of the book it was feeling like the book can logically end at three or four different places, but still it continues and the real mystery unfolds in just the last two pages.

Quite an interesting plot, a good read.

I havn’t read my Sidney Sheldon’s books to claim if it was matching with his style, but worth the time spent.

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If Tomorrow Comes

If Tomorrow Comes ImageThis book is about a young girl – Tracy Whitney, who works for a renowned bank as a computer operator. Tracy’s life was looking all set and she was about to marry a wealthy guy until one fine morning when she receives the news of her mother committing suicide. And the next thing which happened was that she finds herself in prison framed by a mafia don.

Tracy’s life turned upside down when her fiance refused to come to her rescue to protect family name and then she was sexually assaulted by fellow inmates. All these experiences strengthen Tracy’s determination to avenge herself on those who destroyed her life. In the prison a whole lot of drama unfolds when she was trying to escape but she managed to secure a pardon from governor after saving the warden’s daughter from drowning.

Once outside the prison Tracy eliminated her enemies quickly and then was unable to secure a job because of her prison background. This forced Tracy to get into a different world and she became a Con. There she was very successful but was continuously challenged by another Con called Jeff Stevens. During all her adventures as a Con, Tracy was continuously followed by an evil genius investigator Daniel Cooper.

Towards the end both Tracy and Jeff fall into love and decided to Mary and retire until Tracy met…… (Read the book to find out what happened)

When I started this book I was under the impression that the entire book will cover Tracy’s adventure in trying to avenge herself, but that was quickly over in few chapters the moment Tracy was released out of the prison. The rest of the book consists of Tracy’s life as a Con where she dupes the rich and ruthless of their prized possessions.

This is another page turner by Sidney Sheldon and the continuous flow of Tracy’s adventures doesn’t let you stop.

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Nothing Lasts Forever

Nothing Lasts Forever ImageThis book is about three young medical intern girls who were working in a county hospital in San Fransisco. One of them almost closed the hospital down, one murders a patient and inherits the one million dollars and one got herself murdered. In between this the author has demonstrated the then mental make up of American people that how hard it was for people to “not accept” female doctors and always to treat females as an object of sexual desires.

The book started little slow but picked up pace gradually. I liked the absolutely faced paced climax. it was over in around one page or less. Except the prologue and last chapter the book was in a flashback style.

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Installing Mutt on Mac OS X

Apple’s Mac OS X has a beautiful graphical user interface, but under that there is a solid unix foundation. OS X is based on FreeBSD. This unix foundation has allowed OS X to have a native unix command line interface support.

I was usingĀ mutt as my primary email client for many years. But from the past three years or so I chose to move to Mail, the native OS X MUA, primarily due to my requirement of managing my calendar. However, very recently I decided to make another attempt to move to mutt and today is the day when I am installing mutt in my MacBook.

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