Thanks to the lovely folks at BEAM.TV I am now the proud owner of one of these bad boys. It has 1TB of storage and looks like I can add in a second HDD if needed. Nice!rnrnClick here for more…

The blog itself is based on Wordpress which is fantastic and free! It uses a slightly modded version of the Whitewash theme. There’s some Javascript which I pilfered from http://remysharp.com/2007/05/18/add-twitter-to-your-blog-step-by-step/ which pulls down my latest Tweet from twitter and displays it on the right sidebar.rnrnApart from that, its a pretty vanilla install of Wordpress.

So this is my first post on postwork. Some background. I left BEAM.TV at the beginning of September to go freelancing. I’ve been working at BEAM.TV for the past five years, starting as a developer and finishing as head of development. In that time, I worked on many things including the front end website - built in PHP with over one million lines of code! - to some very cool digital signage software for Nokia developed in C# and lots of nuts and bolts programming in between using Perl, PHP, C# or whatever else came to hand for sending large amounts of data around the building and the Internet.rnrnPostwork is my new business focusing on freelance web development - I’m still interested in .NET development if someone has a signage project! - and this blog will document what I am up to as well as anything technical I am dealing with (or struggling to).

While at BEAM.TV I developed a multi screen synchonised interactive display system that integrates with in store lighting and audio. Controlled through the BEAM.TV website, Nokia can manage and deliver new content to any store from anywhere. This system also gives Nokia realtime monitoring and reporting which can be viewed back on the web.

The In-store player system was developed in .NET C# using DirectShow for the video playback allowing fine grained control of where the playhead is - making syncing possible. There are currently nine flagship stores with up to 40 screens in each.

BEAM.TV is a web-based digital asset management system for the media industry that allows clients worldwide to receive and approve media content online. BEAM.TV has more than 100,000 registered users and over 500,000 pieces of archived media.

The web application is written in PHP with an Oracle backend and is fully internationalised supporting right to left languages as well as custom skinning and theming.