Difference between revisions of "Main Page"

Deirdre's Wiki is a test/developmental wiki running on the MediaWiki software engine. This is a private effort to gather research materials, test prototype projects, and develop better wiki methods. If you want to collaborate, you must create an account, confirm the account (click on the link that you receive in the automatically generated e-mail), and send Deirdre an e-mail telling her who you are and, if you haven't worked with Deirdre before, how you came here and what you want to collaborate on.

N.B. This site is not intended to present information from a particular point of view. It is a research library under construction. It contains references that have been gathered to support ongoing projects or those under consideration by the users, not to advocate any position. Material used in this research may be controversial or offensive. Furthermore, the site is being used to develop wiki methods and as an incubator for projects. Incubating projects, such as the pages on photography or Pokémon may be intended to convey information, but are not complete and may be quite stale. Projects such as work on various legal fields are necessarily incomplete and collaborators would be welcome.

Questions regarding this site or work that is on this site may be posted at the community portal or sent to Deirdre via e-mail.

• Photography and digital archiving. This is focused on film photography, developed traditionally, but scanned as negatives and edited digitally. With such methods, a medium format camera costing a few tens to a few hundreds of dollars, combined with a moderately decent flatbed scanner costing less than two hundred dollars, can produce extremely high resolution photographs that a ten thousand dollar digital camera would have difficulty matching for resolution and color. I'm also interested in scanning old film and prints for archiving and ease of reproduction and web display.

• Pokémon. I have children who love Pokémon, in particular, the Pokémon Trading Card Game. We have noticed, however, that the only place that one can easily find the contents of a boxed set is on the back of the box. If you want to order a box from Amazon, you have to guess at what would be good. The official website will provide the contents of a series but it won't tell you precisely which cards come in each box in that series. We are cataloging the cards by boxed set.

• Law. I am a lawyer and I have interests in a wide variety of areas of the law. I hope to assemble some of the material I have used and research I have done. In particular, I am working on an annotated version of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, though most of the work so far is in formatting and there is no meaningful content to view.

• German Language and Culture. I am gathering notes and tables of verbs here, hoping to find a better way to present this material than those that currently exist. Again, I have spent some time on experimenting with formatting but have little content yet for anyone to read. If you are disappointed, I'm sorry, but see the purpose of this site.

• Math. I am very interested in multidimensional geometry and number theory, particularly prime number theory and the relationship between zero and infinity. This will primarily be a collection of reference links and some notes.

• Occult. I am intrigued by the philosophical and spiritual aspects of medieval occult and Kabbalah. Much of the content is not easily available on the web, is available only in scans, or is only in Latin. I hope to improve the web-available content.

• Web development and programming. Just a collection of links and sample pages.

• Sailing and Boat building. Eventually, I hope to have a collection of PD boat designs here.

• US Government employment - Information on how to apply for and keep a government job.

• OpenCourseWare - Education must be free.

• Recipes - Mostly from my family.

• Genealogy - mine. But also a proof of concept.

• Dharma - Notes on the Dharma, mostly just references to help me remember many things I tend otherwise not to.

Significant Sources hosted locally, and sources from the Wikimedia Commons or Wikisource that are actually being used, may listed below. This is not a complete list and many references are used from other sites. Lists of reference links can be found under the topic headings.

N.B. These materials are research references, they do not reflect the views of the owner of this site.

The following projects are ideas, some are more important or closer to fruition than others:

• Hunting & Fishing
• Federal Contracting (United States Federal Government contracting)
• Motorcycles
• Smoking (pipes and cigars)

This is an experimental site and a research library. It contains unusual references, links to a wide variety of sites (many of which are simply on web development and programming), and unfinished, often barely started, work and bare frameworks of ideas. This site is not meant to provide much actual information to general readers. If something here becomes developed enough that I think it would be of use to others, I will launch it separately. There are few exceptions, some very short and highly specialized information may be here, such as my work regarding a complete rebuild of an Argoflex E TLR. If you do find useful information here, please tell me. And if there is specific information you were looking for that I don't have posted, please tell me that too, it will help me know what sorts of things I can add to make the pages more useful. It's also possible that I have the information you are looking for or could provide greater detail, images, or references, but have not yet done so. You may just give me the nudge I need.

This wiki uses the MediaWiki software, in some ways it looks a lot like other wikis; however, this is not a Wikimedia project and has different goals and standards from Wikimedia projects. This wiki is intended to contain divers personal projects and prototype/concept public projects. Unlike Wikimedia projects, this wiki has an editor-in-chief who ultimately controls the content - at least for now; leave a message on her talk page if you have any questions or send an e-mail. Also unlike Wikimedia projects, content need not be verifiable, it need only to present a good idea relevant to the topic of the project. Really good ideas may eventually get carved off into their own projects.

Finally, not everything on this site is free (as in freedom), yet. Because, work is developmental, it is proprietary. Please ask before using my work. That being said, I am an advocate of open content and most of the material here will be released under the CC-BY or CC-BY-SA license, on request.

This site is a wiki, a collaborative website that can be easily edited via an ordinary web browser, like Firefox, by those who have been granted access. This wiki runs on the MediaWiki software engine, which is written in the php programming language, the same software as Wikisource, Wikipedia, and the other Wikimedia Foundation websites. There are other wiki engines available. Another one you might be interested in looking at is MoinMoinWiki, which is written in the Python programming language. I have used both and I prefer the basic functionality of MediaWiki; however, I suspect that for those looking to get into the guts, MoinMoin is probably easier to modify, extend, or debug.

Because it looks neater, links to other MediaWiki wikis, particularly Wikimedia Foundation wikis, normally look just like internal links on this site, i.e. like this, just because a link looks like a local link, doesn't mean that it's on this site. Many text links may actually go to Wikipedia or Wikisource and many images that appear to be on this site may actually be hosted on Wikimedia Commons. Links to non-MediaWiki wikis and other websites normally will look like this - though you may find exceptions because this is an experimental wiki. Be warned and pay attention to the address bar. I won't intentionally take you somewhere dangerous but I can't be responsible for the content (including scripts) on other sites.

N.B. - This site has no affiliation with the Wikimedia Foundation, it only uses their MediaWiki software as its framework and, in the case of many images, it uses Wikimedia Commons as a file server. Although not affiliated with this site, I highly encourage you to take a look at the Wikimedia family of sites, particularly the Wikisource sites and Wikimedia Commons site, which contain many public domain reference materials.

Deirdre Hendrick is the owner of this website. She is an attorney, auditor, cybersecurity professional, and Army officer. Deirdre created this site as a place to collect the many references she was gathering up and to try to cut down on the number of open tabs in Firefox while not forgetting where in her bookmarks she put that darned link. It's also a place to test MediaWiki code and tools and to publish things that don't belong elsewhere.

There is more information available about Deirdre at her LinkedIn page. If you have questions or want an account, send her an e-mail.