Steve's random ramblings and technical notes

Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Learn About Yourself

SimilarMinds - Personality Tests and Tools
(I found this thanks to a link on Pisces Peach's Blog)


My Myers-Briggs Type is ENTP (unchanged since 1986)

Extroverted (E) 55.88% Introverted (I) 44.12%

Intuitive (N) 52.78% Sensing (S) 47.22%

Thinking (T) 62.07% Feeling (F) 37.93%

Perceiving (P) 56.25% Judging (J) 43.75%


ENTP - "Inventor". Enthusiastic interest in everything and always sensitive to possibilities. Non-conformist and innovative. 3.2% of the total population.
Take Free Myers-Briggs Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com


My Enneagram results show
Conscious self
Overall self


Enneagram Test Results
Type 1 Perfectionism |||||||||||||| 60%
Type 2 Helpfulness |||||||||||||| 60%
Type 3 Image Awareness |||||||||||||||| 63%
Type 4 Sensitivity |||| 16%
Type 5 Detachment |||||||||| 36%
Type 6 Anxiety |||||||||| 40%
Type 7 Adventurousness |||||||||||||| 60%
Type 8 Aggressiveness |||||||||||||| 53%
Type 9 Calmness |||||||||||||||| 63%
Your Conscious-Surface type is 9w1
Your Unconscious-Overall type is 1w2
Take Free Enneagram Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com


What are you worth?

Monday, March 29, 2004

Math Conversion - Binary-Hex-Decimal

I've got a pretty good handle on Binary to Decimal (and back) but need to understand Hex as well for reading tcpdump headers. With that in mind, here are a few links with conversion calculations.

HOW TO CONVERT ANY HEX NUMBER TO DECIMAL and BINARY
HOW TO CONVERT ANY DECIMAL NUMBER TO HEX
How to Convert Binary to Hex (bottom of page)
Ask Dr. Math
One more...


I know, there are calculators out there, but I want to be able to do this in my head.

BSOD - Arrgh, this is killing me!

Okay, here's the deal...

I wanted to update the touchpad drivers on my laptop because the scrolling feature was grayed out in Control Panel (Win XP Pro). I downloaded the 7.8.10 drivers from Synaptics and installed them. During installation, it asked for two files, i8042prt.sys and mouclass.sys. I found the first on my WinXP CD, but not the second. I went ahead and pointed the installer at the copy in WINNT/SYSTEM32/DRIVERS. Everything seemed okay when it finished up. (Note, both of these files have a version number of 5.1.2600.1106 (xpsp1.020828-1920), so obviously installed by XP Service Pack 1.)

But then... The next day, I get a Blue Screen O' Death - KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR
*** STOP: 0x00000077 (0xC000000E 0xC000000E 0x00000000 0x012E1000)

Of course, I reboot the first time or two, but then it seems to be happening far too often. I start Googling for answers... Unfortunately, the information I find all seems to be a rehash of one MS Knowledgebase article which is informative, but doesn't address my specific error. One more that I found is Support WebCast: Microsoft Windows XP: How to Configure and Use Error Reporting.

That's a good-news / bad-news kind of thing. The good news is that it's not likely to be RAM, HDD, cabling or other equipment identified in the article. The bad news is that 0xC000000E is not identified... Hmm...

I uninstalled the 7.8.10 touchpad driver after downloading the "correct" one for my machine from Gateway. Then rebooted, let it "find new hardware" and installed ver 6.0.23.0 - again, everything seemed okay until the next BSoD - grrr...

I'm now about this || close to backing up my profile, deleting the Windows directory and installing it all over again... I wonder if MS support or Synaptics support would be of any help?

Oh, but if I exercise my dual-boot option, Slackware 9.1 works perfectly!

-Edit-
I found version 5.0.2195.66xx of both mouclass.sys and i8042prt.sys on another XP system at the office. I've renamed both originals to *.old and copied the non-SP1 versions to WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/DRIVERS. We'll see what happens after a reboot...

Speaking of Dual-Booting...

Here are a few links to more information...
How-to Dual Boot Windows XP and Fedora from Overclockers Club (includes screen shots all the way through)
Multibooting with Windows XP
About.com's Index
Computing.net article
from KSU with additional LILO and GRUB tips
of course, this will always find additional links if these aren't enough info.

Here's a good explanation of Booting Linux from Windows' Boot Manager

Tips:
- Use Knoppix or a variant with QTParted to resize and move the partitions if you already have Windows installed.
- Multibooting with LILO

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