About

Who?
Well, I’m Nathan L. Reynolds and I’m an Information Security professional – Who am I kidding? I practically live and breathe the stuff! – Anyway, I live in Old Stratford, England. I’m a certified CISSP (Certified Information System Security Professional), I’ve also been known to hold an MCSE, and CCSE. Currently, I’m studying for my Masters of Science (M.Sc.) in Computer Security with the University of Liverpool / Laureate Online Education.

Please note, I have more projects to list below under both sections… It’s a time consuming process digging up all this history! Also, these are just the personal time fillers, and not related to my professional life. I typically execute very different types of projects for a living.

Current Personal Projects
I occasionally get a bright idea, and stumble off to make it happen. Theses are the ones that are currently receiving attention:

• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Facebook Application: This application uses XML feeds provided by the official ETQW web-site, and then pushes a profile box to registered Facebook users’ profiles, with some basic player statistics.
• HMS Annabelle: This web site is intended to one day be a source of information for a literary universe I’m creating, for which to base a steam-punk novel in.
• WordPress Web Tripwire Plugin: I’m currently developing a WordPress Plug-in, which is based upon this research into Web Tripwires. A Web Tripwire is a mechanism which compares the web server’s view of a web-site, with the client’s view of the web-site, if the two are different, then the page has possibly been altered in transit. Development code is currently running on the HMS Annabelle site.

Long Term Projects
These are the projects that clearly have nothing to do with computing, and are things I indulge in when I need a little downtime that doesn’t involve reading, video gaming, films, ETC.

• Poetry: I occasionally can be caught relaxing and writing poetry. I aim to collect enough over the course of the coming years to help me figure out what the heck to do with all of them. Perhaps a book.
• Bowyery and Fletching: I’ve been known to make longbows, and fletch arrows.

Older Personal Projects
Occasionally, some of my projects get left at the way-side. Either they’re run their course, hit dead ends, or failed to garner enough interest in order to justify further development. Not all of them have been consigned to binary hell, and some are still available.

Web Sites:

• DruidWiki.org: This was a WikiWikiWeb project originally based upon MoinMoin, then ported lots of plugins from Sycamore, and then finally migrated to Sycamore. I also worked with the primary developer of Sycamore to develop an up to date migration script.
• Druid.tv: This was a fledgling video content service based upon WordPress and the Broadcast Machine, which was an RSS capable BitTorrent tracker used for getting content primarily to Miro users.

General Hacking

• Enterprise Log Management System: I wrote a distributed ELM using a combination of PHP, MySQL and syslog-ng, OpenSSL, Snare, and oddly enough; PHPNuke. It saw one installation which spread across three continents, and it was in active use for a few years.

Quake IV

• Terminal Gibbage 10th Anniversary Skins: A Quake IV modification which brought renditions of the clan’s old QuakeWorld skins to Quake IV. [ Link ]

Neverwinter Nights:

• Random Task Generator: This Neverwinter Nights modification generated low level simple quest content for persistent on-line worlds. Many NWN on-line worlds used it, and I hear rumour that some still do. [ Download | Read me ]
• Rideable Creatures: More Neverwinter Nights fun. This time, I based a modification upon other people work, but fixed long standing bugs and flawed implementations to a create a player ridable creatures system, which actually worked. [ Download | Readme ]
• Dark Times of Formoria: A persistent world for BioWare’s original Neverwinter Nights game. Includes player housing, legal system, Hardcore Rule Set (HCR) (a project I contributed too), cohorts (another project I contributed too), MySQL integration, and the Random Task Generator. It also featured a MUSH-like approach when handling area decoration and linking. [ Download ]
• The World of Calyn: Another Neverwinter Nights persistent world with various community and custom made systems. This one was almost ready to go live, but I released it to the community, hoping that someone with the server resources would be able to take it up. [ Download | Read me ]

Vampire: The Masquerade: Redemption

• The Prophecy: Discovery: That’s a heck of a lot of sub-headers! This was an add-on mission which I wrote for the VtMR game. Not the best story telling, but aimed at players which found other community missions way too difficult. This mission rewarded more for diplomacy, as opposed to gun-toting. [ Download | Read me ]

Quake:

• Item Skins for Quake: This was my first modification for the original Quake game from id Software. Fairly simple fare, player skins changed to reflect the current active power-up. This modification actually got slurped up and included on a PC Format (if memory serves) cover CD. [ Download | Read me ]

8-bit

• SAM Coupé: The SAM Coupé was a 8-bit machine designed to be the killer ZX Spectrum, and a whole lot more. However, in a 16-bit dominated market it was doomed to fail, but made a very interesting hobbiest machine. As an excitable thirteen year old kid; I was involved in a public domain disk-zine effort called RTJ, before creating my own group called Metempsychosis. A few years ago, I imaged all the floppy disks I had and made them available to the community. You can grab then here, and then run them through an emulator like SimCoupe.