NAIROBI - Kenya is eagerly awaiting the imminent switch-on of its first fibre-optic cable, which many hope will spark an explosion in high-tech business and boost the East African nation's struggling economy.

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We had reviewed n-Gage: Brother in Arms and n-Gage: One earlier when Nokia gave us a Nokia N81 for n-Gage reviewing purpose. This time around its Age of Empires III and you sure don't need an introduction for this one. Age of Empires has been one of the most acclaimed and popular strategy games over the years in video games industry. So to put it in mobile gaming was an obvious choice for Nokia. Let's see how this first real time strategy game faired to our first impression.

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Google has released SketchUp 7 (download), the latest free version of its 3D modeling software along with its big bro- SketchUp 7 Pro (which is a paid version). With some pre-designed templates, you can draw and model just about anything. Not only that, it also includes architectural design, Google Earth, and a product design template to aid you in your modeling endeavors. Once familiar with the prima facie, we gave it a try and came out with the following points.

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Internet shopping malls / shopping carts aren't new. Today we will review a quality but free shopping mall to display and sell your products.

Mals-e

Mals-e is a remotely hosted free shopping cart application built with designer & marketers in mind. It helps people sell products on their website and makes it easy to hook into third-party payment processors. So basically you go to their website, register and start selling your products. Through some HTML formatting your website is embedded into their system and anyone who comes to mals-e can see your products there listed under one roof like we do in a shopping mall.

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While debugging code Java programmers often use System.out.println(). It is important to write separate message in each System.out.println() so you can understand from the output where the problem lies.

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Recently I had to travel from Kolkata to San Francisco via New Delhi, New York City and return via Los Angeles and Frankfurt, pretty much I covered the globe twice in eight days with 4 days or actual work / fun. Here is my experience in brief.

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I faced a vexing problem with the otherwise excellent Mozilla Thunderbird email client. I was unable to forward emails to another account using the rules in Message Filters. I can normally forward emails. I can also execute other actions in the message filters except forwarding. It fails with a simple error message: "Sending of message failed". The simple solution lies in understanding the design of email accounts & message filters in Thunderbird, as described below in details.

BTW: At one point before solving this problem I even thought about switching to Evolution. And I am not alone. Several people posted the same problem on Mozilla forum without getting any solution.
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There is a minor-war going on in Sun Alumni mailing list and elsewhere where the common misconception: "Java is slow" is surfacing again and again, much to the dismay of knowledgeable Java developers who have known for ages that Java is fast even compared to C++ and has been so for several years. All this re-surfaced because Sun decided to change its ticker symbol to JAVA (previously it was SUNW). All of this is terribly frustrating to Java developers who take pride in Java and are well aware of its capabilities because they leverage it every day. So let's rest this myth to rest once and for all, shall we?

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Stephen Glass became infamous in 1998 after being exposed for fabricating large amount of his articles culminating in the famous "Hack Heaven", a story of a 15 year old hacker who landed a plum job in a software company after defacing their website. Stephen Glass became the subject of a movie titled - "Shattered Glass", which I happened to see partly today on HBO. In the process I started thinking about a somewhat similar incident I faced in recent past. The part of Stephen's story which is most interesting to me is how he duped the often skeptical and hardened editors of several famous news outlets, how did he perfectly pass the "stink test" so many times, how did he bypass the fact checking system in place at TNR?

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Harry Potter and The Order of Hackers
Everytime a new Harry Potter book comes out there is an unannounced competition within hackers to be the first to scan it (ocr it) and post it online. Russian servers are an obvious choice as they are harder to track and shutdown. On the other hand Mrs. Rowling and her order of blood-thirsty lawyers are ready to pounce upon anyone who has the remotest chance to leak any of the content of the book. They work overtime to ensure any leaks are quickly plugged in and the concerned persons prosecuted. Rowling is so much afraid of hackers that she doesn't allow publishing in eBook format. Her manuscripts is worth much more its weight in gold (24 carats). And in the middle of all this charade lies the children; many of them wait late in the night to be one of the early ones to be able to read it. And what do they read?

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