River of No Reprieve

I found this book (River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia’s Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny) last week in library about Jeffrey Tayler‘s travel down the Lena river in Siberia. It caught my eyes because I know so little about that part of the world (not that I know so much more about other parts but you know what I mean :)). Everything I had ever read about Siberia was in negative connotations about getting exiled and gulags etc. It is a great book about a very interesting travel in the remote part of the world. I am about half way through this book but what is interesting is it gives glimpses of Russian history through the conversations he had with people. They talk about Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Stalin, Gorbachev and Putin. I think this is one of the most fascinating country of extreme weathers that has seen extreme changes politically, socially and economically. Traveling along Lena, we meet people who have wide variety of views where people think Gorbachev brought drastic changes too fast and people who think that Stalinist era was good in terms of stability and structure it provided. They talk about Putin and Bush, they talk about Cossacks and Czars. It is a great book as it shows unseen Russia through eyes of common people.

Virtual Earth in Silverlight

Greg Schechter, One of the Architects on Silverlight, blogged about the sample that he wrote which uses Silverlight with Virtual Earth.

Here is the link to the actual working application.

Silverlight on Bluelight

Finally I got chance to play around with Bluelight (Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live). Thought I wish tools would make it lot easier, manual steps are not that hard to figure out.

1. Create silverlight V1.0 player application (using Expression media encoder) with video and all the JS files required
2. Create a package of your video using instructions in quick start.
3. Host it on your website. It seems they have started supporting hosting using iframe which is lot more easier than earlier script based approach. you can find information about new approach here in news article on 1st of August.