I come from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in the North of England, and live in Leeds, in the pretend North of England. I'm married to the lovely Katie Buffalo, she's a 'murican and the best thing since sliced bread, we met on the internet, it's the future.
I've recently finished a long stint working for Sense Internet, tying ribbons of PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash and ActionScript into pretty bows. And am now settling in to the distinctly more Python-flavoured environs of Isotoma in York.
If you've looked at the archives at all you may have noticed there's a gap of 2 years unaccounted for. The entries preceding that lull are from a site called pixelised.com that my brother and I used to run. Seemed a shame to let them go to waste.
If you'd like to get in touch with me, you can send an email to mtarbit, plus an at-sign, then gmail, with a dot-com.
This website plays host to 812 entries which can be broken down by type as 379 posts, 322 links, 91 statuses, 14 quotes and 6 reviews. There's also a library of 271 books by 197 authors.
Entries prior to 2003 were written by Matt and Dan Tarbit with occasional contributions from Jonathan Lumb. Unfortunately, attribution for some of the older posts and comments has been obscured by the mists of time.
The site is built using the Ruby on Rails framework backed by a MySQL database. Posts are marked up in the markdown syntax and parsed by the BlueCloth gem. Code is highlighted with Pygments. Some of the data for links and reviews is obtained via web service APIs. The rubilicious library is used to sync bookmarks from a del.icio.us account, the twitter gem is used to retrieve my statuses from Twitter and the httparty gem is used to search for and retrieve amazon product details for reviews and associate links. Emails are sent via Gmail's SMTP service with a helping hand from lib/smtp_tls.rb. The site is served by Apache 2 & mod_rails on a Linode VPS, shared thanks to the kindly benefaction of Ben Walton. Code is written in Textmate, vim and version controlled with the help of github. Icons are used here and there from the free silk icon set by Mark James.