SEVOCAB: Software and Systems Engineering Vocabulary

Find authoritative definitions for software and systems engineering terms in SEVOCAB. A project of the IEEE Computer Society and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC7, SEVOCAB includes definitions from international standards. You can search for a term as defined in the standards, or for all the definitions in a source standard.

To give you an understanding of related concepts, SEVOCAB will return any definition for the term, as well as all the definitions that use the term.

Visit http://www.computer.org/sevocab to search or download the vocabulary.

TWIN e-Book Volume 1

Volume 1 of the TWIN e-book is available for free download at http://www.twin-india.org/.

It is an enormous effort to compile posts from past 5 years at the TWIN mailing list into a useful, searchable, downloadable e-book. Read more about the effort, planning and the team at http://infodeveloper.wordpress.com/tag/twin-book/ .

It's amazing what you can achieve with merely an idea, leadership and volunteers.

STC 2008 Conference in Pune

Some of us are attending STC India's 10th Annual conference this Friday (12th) and Saturday (13th Dec 2008) at Le Meridien, Pune.

About the Conference

After a 4-year hiatus, the STC India conference returns to the burgeoning metropolis of Pune for a historic third time. The STC India conference is the largest gathering of technical communicators in the country. On December 12 and 13, 2008, the thriving city of Pune (Maharashtra) will play host to the technical communication fraternity from across the country, and even the world. Read more..."

Related sites: Society for Technical Communication (STC), Technical Writers of India (TWIN).

Error in Perforce: Can't clobber writable files

I use Perforce for source control of the Teamcenter documentation files. Today, I noticed some files were revised and checked-in by other users. When I tried to get the latest version of the files by Sync to Head Revision, Perforce gave the following error:

"Can't clobber writable file..."

I found it was because some of the files on my local drive were not in read-only mode. Its a known fact that when we check-in a file after modifications, Perforce marks our local copy of the file read-only. However, in this case, it was not known why that did not happen. It assumed that since the local file was not in read-only mode, the file was open for edit. If Perforce allowed the Sync to Head Revision, the files could have been corrupted.

The solution was to manually mark my local copies of the files read-only. On Sync to Head Revision now, Perforce did not throw any error message.

Click here to read about other users who encountered the same error message and their possible causes.