Tag Archive for 'error'

Perforce: Can’t Clobber Writable File Error

Published on May 12, 2012 in Tech. 0 Comments

When getting the latest version of a package from a perforce repository I was getting the following error:

Can’t clobber writable file

And of course the file was not being updated. Remember that all the files in perforce are marked as read-only unless opened by the ‘p4 edit’ command. I did a ‘p4 opened’ to check if the file had been opened for edit. It was not. Then I checked the permissions and found that the file was marked as writable.

Simply removing the writable field from the permissions of the file did the trick.

chmod -w <filename>

Now when I did a ‘p4 sync’ the file got updated. Happy.

Popularity: 1% [?]

JVM : Out Of Memory PermGen

Published on January 24, 2012 in Tech. 0 Comments

Interesting thing I did not know about Java – PermGen. Apparently other than just the stack (local variables and methods) and the heap (everything else), java uses this extra storage which can also cause OOMs.

PermGen is where a few very long-lived types of objects are persisted in Java, such as class definitions and ‘intern’ed Strings.  It uses separate storage from the heap and the stack.  If you run out of PermGen you will get out of memory errors.  If you run very low you will get a JVM that spends all its time garbage collecting.

Few things I came about when I googled around:

Luckily I’ve never had to deal with PermGen OOM before. Apparently it’s hell-of-a-job debugging this issue.

From The SDE Tip – Amazon

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Mistake of the Day : rm -rf ~

Published on October 24, 2011 in Anu. 0 Comments

Kids these days huh! They never exercise caution before executing the rm -rf command. It’s gotten ingrained into their habit to use it just as commonly as ls. Careless people. And that is exactly what I did! Damn it! So here’s what happened.

I use tmux in which ` is set as the control character. So it’s pretty common for me to reach out to the ` keystroke. Now I was editing a file in vi. I wanted to save the file and move to the previous tmux screen.

:wq followed by “

Now : requires the SHIFT key be pressed. So usually you get used to having a finger over the SHIFT key. I entered the :wq command. But then somehow my fingers also pressed the SPACE and ~ keystrokes. So I ended up doing

:wq ~

Pff. Vi created a new file named ~. Bah. And then by habit, even before my brain could process anything, my fingers typed in

rm -rf ~

:D . In their defense their intention was just to delete the ~ file. But – Disaster! :’(

At this point I must mention that I was in the root directory /. Luckily enough I did not create a file named *. :D .

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Firefox Beta 4 Screwing Up My Display Driver

Published on November 16, 2010 in Miscel. 0 Comments

Ever since I upgraded to the 4b6 of Firefox, my screen occasionally goes blank for a few seconds and then I get a message telling me that my display driver had stopped working. It ultimately led me to revert back to Firefox 3. An updated beta, the 4b7, was released yesterday and I was optimistic that the problem might have been solved. However to my dismay, the issue remains.

nVidia_firefoxBeta_error

A quick search threw up results of forums where people have complained about the nVidia driver crashing because of Firefox 4. Some suspect it may be because of the Direct2D feature newly implemented in the upcoming Firefox. There were suggestions to update the nVidia graphics driver to solve the problem. But unfortunately, even that does not help.

I think I’ll keep using the beta so long as the crashes are infrequent and Firefox is able to recover from them. Otherwise I will be forced to use the Firefox 3 until a more stable beta has been released.

Popularity: 3% [?]