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Wednesday, May 9, 2012
CHA Tutorial: Beaded Star Fish
51 comments:
These are SO cool looking- very realistic!ReplyDelete
Love the starfish....they look awesome!!ReplyDelete
Really neat! Who designed all the decor? Was it you guys, or did you have some help from a booth company/vendor?ReplyDelete
Congrats to the winners!!ReplyDelete
This is so very creative and pretty, too! Thanks for sharing!
Wow...what a great starfishReplyDelete
WOW!! I live in Florida and they look soooo REAL!ReplyDelete
Congrats to the new winners.
Creative Wishes,
Claire S.
These are awesome!!! So pretty.ReplyDelete
Congrats & enjoy! Love the starfish!ReplyDelete
I am ecstatic to have won! Thanks so much for the giveaway. Those starfish look amazingly real. One would never guess that they are made from supplies many of us have alying around our houses!ReplyDelete
Wowie! These starfish are amazing! These would be fun to make in miniature for a beach layout too :) Thanks for the tutorial Erin! Congrats to all the winners!ReplyDelete
Those starfish are awesome looking! What a wonderful idea. TFSReplyDelete
Congrats to the winners and what a great idea and tutorial for the start fish. I think they'd make great Xmas ornaments on the tree,too.ReplyDelete
I love those starfish! Totally coolReplyDelete
This is great! Thanks for the tutorial :)ReplyDelete
What a fun look!!! ;)ReplyDelete
Congrats winners! Enjoy the Xyron!ReplyDelete
Thanks for sharing the star fish tutorial.ReplyDelete
cute starfish - thanks for sharing them with us!ReplyDelete
How cute they are. I'd like to make some for my beach themed guest room.ReplyDelete
Congratulations to the winners, what a cute little craft project, would be fun to do with my grand daughter.ReplyDelete
Congrats to the winners! Those starfish look great! Thanks for the tutorial on them.ReplyDelete
Very cool starfish!ReplyDelete
nice starfish tutorial! thank you for sharing.ReplyDelete
i have shared your post on my facebook page.ReplyDelete
These Star Fish are really cool.ReplyDelete
Very interesting. I think your booth is going to be really neat.ReplyDelete
Very well done. You could make lots of things with this clay. TFS JessReplyDelete
Wow - amazing!ReplyDelete
Wow - now THAT'S a starfish. Way to go ...ReplyDelete
Beautiful starfish, what a great project. TFSReplyDelete
motherloves3 at hotmail dot com
great project!ReplyDelete
- Lisa SMay 10, 2012 at 8:50 AM
Wow - love these starfish. What a fun project!ReplyDelete
those are so pretty!ReplyDelete
I had to look twice, I thought they were real at first! Awesome starfish!ReplyDelete
Wow, those Starfish are amazing. Great project.ReplyDelete
Fantastic! We have a small half bath that I like to decorate "ocean theme" for parties and guests! I wonder if Fimo would work just as well? Thanks for the great tips!ReplyDelete
These are awesome! I love the way they look....so life like. Thanks for sharing another great creation.ReplyDelete
Those starfish are awesome....so realistic!ReplyDelete
very cool. tfs.ReplyDelete
- Lisa ScMay 10, 2012 at 12:24 PM
These look amazing - and totally do-able. Thanks for the inspiration!ReplyDelete
great project! I love that you have this celluclay to make these. My Mother-in-law is specializing in shell crafts and they make decoration using baby star fish.ReplyDelete
Shared your post on twitterReplyDelete
Shared your project on PinterestReplyDelete
Wow! These look really neat!!ReplyDelete
love these starfish...........these are a must for my bathroom to go with my sea shell decor........thanks for the idea!!ReplyDelete
These are great! Thanks for sharing them.ReplyDelete
Very creative!ReplyDelete
Beautiful starfish! Thanks for the how-to!ReplyDelete
The star fish, look really neat!ReplyDelete
WOW these are awesome, thanks for sharing.ReplyDelete


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I managed to accumulate two main things at StackOverflow DevDays Cambridge yesterday:
- An almighty hangover, courtesy of Red Gate's endless supply of free booze in the evening.
- A huge bag of quality schwag garnered from various corners of the conference, including a free copy of the Aardvark'd DVD, some fish toys that Red Gate had brought for some reason and various stickers and stationery etc.
And inbetween hunting and gathering, Carsonified put on a conference. Talking of which:
Joel Spolsky – Opening Keynote
So I only saw half of this, because even though I had left the house at 5:10am, I didn't get to Cambridge until 9:10am. For the record: TweetDeck and Byline had my iPhone battery at 50% before even stepping off the train. Despite arriving late, I had no worries, because the pieces of Joel's keynote that I missed seemed just to be what was on the last StackOverflow podcast. What I did catch, however, was typical Joel stuff. He was riffing on JWZ's "How will this software get my users laid" and managed fairly well to mix threads of low-grade erotic fiction and software usability into a quality rant. Good stuff, although I couldn't stop picturing how much Joel would look like Stanley Tucci if he had less hair. I don't know if that affected anyone else's enjoyment of the talk. Probably not.
Ryan Carson – Carsonified
While Ryan wasn't a speaker at the conference, we got to see plenty of him, and he entertained with his now trademark "three minutes left", "two minutes left" and incessant polling. Nah, just kidding, Ryan's alright.
Christian Heilmann – Yahoo! Developer Tools
This was a pretty good, made all the more enjoyable because hearing a big ginger German guy swearing is good, clean fun. Christian's was one of the talks I was looking forward to, having heard the buzz about YQL from attendees of the previous London event. As you'll read from everyone else's write-up, Yahoo have wrapped dozens of data sources of their own, and made it possible for others to expose theirs, allowing queries in an SQL-like syntax over HTTP. You can imagine the rest, but here are some specifics from the talk and a brief chat afterwards that might not have been mentioned elsewhere:
- It's throttled to 10,000 requests an hour, 100,000 a day.
- It runs on Hadoop over 50 machines at Yahoo, although Christian's not on the team and wasn't sure of the exact architecture (he mentioned pixies though).
- They intend to offer a version that you can host yourself on Google App Engine.
- He regretted not mentioning in the talk that you can write transformations for YQL results in JavaScript. This uses Rhino, presumably running in the above-mentioned Hadoop cluster.
The other thrust of his talk was about writing apps/widgets for the Yahoo home page. Yahoo have made their stuff Caja compliant to allow sandboxing of client-side apps, and while only large partners are able to publish their widgets, soon anyone will be able to offer useless crap to put on their Yahoo home page (and reach the 330 million users thereof). Good opportunity when it happens, although if you planned on monetizing your app somehow, it sounds like you'll suffer the same problems getting noticed as you would on the iPhone app store – there'll be featured apps and categories, but I think it'll just end up as a sea of under-appreciated apps drowning each other out. I can't help but think the Facebook model of apps spreading virally is the way to go here – you install an app because someone has attacked you with some sort of flying monkey, and when you click to fling a monkey back, you install the app as a side-effect. You never knew you wanted the app – you're hooked in before you knew it existed. That said, Facebook apps are all shite and I don't use them, but I don't use Yahoo either so I guess I'm not the target market.
Like most Facebook apps, you'll need your own server to serve up the content of your app, and while I asked if there were any plans to offer hosting for pure HTML/JavaScript apps (perhaps targeting just YQL data), Christian said they didn't want people to have to rely on them to keep their stuff alive, which perhaps in the light of GeoCities' retirement is fair enough.
Frank Stajano
Frank's a security researcher at Cambridge, and presented his seven principles for systems security. These principles are basically seven easy exploits in human psychology, upon which all sorts of scams, both online and off, are based. The majority of the talk was just extracts from The Real Hustle which he says is required viewing for his PhD students, but he didn't really make a big enough leap from there to how this affected computer systems day to day. A few of us chatted to him afterwards at lunch asking about what's to be done to remedy some of the problems, especially as he mentioned that often we compound the issues by teaching bad behaviour – online banking sites on weird, random URLs for example. Unfortunately, his research seems purely related to uncovering the exploits, he could only offer the guidance that we just take the inverse of his seven principles. So, our vulnerability to 'deception' being one of them, we… er… don't lie to our users. I'm not sure if that's what he meant. Anyway, I also asked him what he thought of things like OpenID and 3D Secure because I think these are two hugely flawed systems that for many users just teach the behaviour that if you see the right logo, you type what's asked of you. His reponse to that is that if we're going to use those systems in our apps, we should be the ones that take responsibility for our users or their data being exploited. Which is funny, because the removal of that burden is pretty much exactly why 3D Secure exists.
All in all, some very interesting content from the theoretical standpoint, and certainly some useful stuff if you are into threat modelling and such, but it would be nice if Frank gave us some pointers to at least someone else's work on the flip side of preventing these problems – it was an audience largely made up of implementors, after all.
Joel Spolsky – FogBugz
This would have been too much of a sales pitch if we weren't sort of in the market for a (bug/issue/requirement/case) management system at the moment. From what we saw, FogBugz towers above Mingle in both functionality and especially ease-of-use. We also got a quick demo of the brand-new Kiln. While it looked useful (hosted source control and code-review), the fact that you'd have to host your code on someone else's servers would be a deal-breaker for every company I've ever worked with. Bringing that up with Internet-famous Aardvarkster Benjamin Pollack over lunch, he assured me that the current number one priority was making the Kiln plugin available for the licensed (self-hosted) version of FogBugz. It'll come to Windows first, Unix afterwards and six months sounded like a reasonable time-frame. To that end, I put my name down for the beta, and as I think I qualify for the free startup licensing that Fog Creek offers, I'll definitely be spending some time with both tools.
Red Gate – Lunchtime Presentation
I arrived a little late for this, and never caught the name of the product being discussed (although I'm pretty sure Reflector was mentioned at one point – more on that in a bit). The talk was given by a designer at Red Gate whose name I also missed , but it was actually a really revealing presentation. Red Gate iterate early and often, and record regular design reviews. We shared the presenter's pain as a user on the recording tried desperately to find the code he was interested in, with no help at all from the tool he was testing. This feeling was intensified for me because I'd come in late, and assumed we were actually witnessing some disastrous live conference-call-slash-demo as part of the presentation. However, the presenter's pain was only remembered, and the talk went on to show how the early embarrassments helped them focus on areas for improvement (although some of the bugs didn't seem like they should ever have left a programmer's machine) and track their progress honestly and openly. Recordings of later, successful demos revealed an atmosphere at Red Gate that must have driven at least a few people to speak the recruitment team manning their booth in the dinner hall.
Talking of which, I learned a couple of interesting things. First, I was never really clear on the nature of their Springbroad programme. For some reason I thought it was pretty much just office space and some free coffee, but they're actually funding the startups they brought in over the Summer, and unlike YCombinator, not taking any equity in return. Now, I suspect the quality of leads generated by the latter is higher, but you can't argue that it's a good deal, and while details weren't clear on whether there was to be a Winter intake to the programme this year, the people I spoke to said they were always open to good ideas and would consider any applications that came through any time. Interesting stuff, although I've not followed any of startups involved, so have no idea how successful it's all been.
More importantly, I managed to speak to Bart Read, head of Red Gate's .NET developer division. I'd been slightly worried that nothing much had seemed to happen with the awesome Reflector since they'd taken it over, but he pointed out that there was currently a beta available the next version. That'll bring Visual Studio integration, and cool stuff (for .NET developers at least) like stepping through other people's source code. It'll be a paid product (current functionality will always remain free) and sounded like it might land in February. I intend try the beta over the next few weeks, although it sounded like VS 2010 beta 2 might have broken things.
Steven Sanderson – ASP.NET MVC
I think most people that care about ASP.NET MVC know about it now, so I won't go over the content too much here. I did have a lively conversation at tea-time comparing it to Tapestry, but it's safe to say that it joins the vanishingly small list of web frameworks that I would describe as 'not bad'.
The thing I'd like to focus on is actually Steve himself. As others will have mentioned, he was by far the quickest of the presenters on the day, and got through a fair amount of real code interspersed with enough dry humour to keep it engaging. What I think was brilliant, though, was just the slickness of the presentation. He had complete command of his content and his tools, and sailed smoothly from step to step without any ceremony. I came away really impressed that while we watched two presenters on Macs beachballing all day, Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 just seemed to get on with the job. Needless to say, this has not always been my experience with Vista and VS 2008.
Anyway, the talk picked out a few of the nice features of MVC 2.0 that you of course already know about, but it was nice, as I'd only bought his book the week before. In true schwag hag style, I asked Steve to sign it, and while he was a bit confused by the whole experience, he very kindly obliged.
Remi Sharp – jQuery
It must have been tough to know where to pitch this talk, as there was a real variety of levels of experience with jQuery in the room. As it turned out, Remi opted to launch an almost encyclopaedic attack on the jQuery API, and given my 4:45am start, I found myself drifting a little. Right at the death, he started on a practical example, and there was palpable tension in the room as the clock ticked down. It might have been nicer to start with the example and expound upon the features and syntax it demonstrated, but as it was time ran out and Remi had to finish it in the break. I didn't stay around to see the finished article, although various tweets said it was well worth the wait.
Michael Foord – Python
It was a huge surprise that the Knuth-packing beardo in the front row turned out to be a Windows developer, demoing on IronPython. Michael was excellent, and after demoing some IronPython/WinForms interop for shits and giggles, was working with the now hugely over-analysed spelling corrector by Peter Norvig. I suspect his talk was better than Mark Harrison's at San Francisco – although I only have a snippet of podcast to go on for the latter – if only because Michael sounded the more opinionated. There's nothing hugely new to say here about either spelling corrections or Python, but Michael's day job at Resolver Systems making highly programmable spreadsheets sounded interesting.
Jeff Atwood – StackOverflow
Comedy slides and an ironically short, subdued talk about passion closed out the day. Again, I'd heard most of this on the podcast and honestly was just thinking about the free beer, so can't do Jeff justice. The most satisfying takeaway from the talk was really just 'mission accomplished'. StackOverflow probably isn't perfect, but they executed on their vision and it worked out. While the launch of StackOverflow careers and Stack Exchange have obviously taken up the two teams' time recently, it wasn't clear what else remained on the roadmap, or if Jeff and Joel had any plans outside the Q&A arena.
After Party
And then there were beers at Henry's. Met a very interesting guy called James Nicholson, who develops the mobile clients at Taptu, a mobile search engine. James stayed in Cambridge after uni and it was fascinating to hear just how many startups, and how much VC money, has come to Cambridge and its science park. It sounds like the perfect place to be if you're starting up in the UK, and that the whole area is very easy on the eye is just a bonus.
I also bumped into my brother in law. Random.
With a dead iPhone battery, I crawled home on the last train to add my schwag to the mountainous hoard I keep in the dungeon below my castle. Sometimes I sit on it and wait for men with swords to come. They never do.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
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Donald Humphrey Stonesifer
Position: E
Height: 6-0 Weight: 200 lbs.
Born: January 29, 1927 in Chicago, IL
High School: Carl Schurz
College: Northwestern (school history)
Drafted by the Chicago Cardinals in the 3rd round (30th overall) of the 1951 NFL Draft.
Weighted Career AV (100-95-...): 0 (15060th overall since 1950)
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text:
Around noon today, The Community Pet Project received a call stating that there was a stray dog in an Easley community that is eaten up with mange. Janet and Deb, members of TCPP, took off over there to pick her up to get her immediate medical attention.
TCPP is a 501(c)3 nonprofit created to help sick, injured, matted, and hungry pets in the Upstate - no matter the breed or species.
Much to their surprise, this is who they found - a little female Cocker Spaniel puppy, whom a resident had in her home waiting for our arrival.
The only thing that they learned from this resident was the dog had been named Sunshine and that she had been on the premises for two months. This poor pup is covered in sores and scabs from mange and very sickly.
TCPP took Sunshine straight to Hillcrest Animal Hospital, where her medical condition was assessed by Dr. Stephenson. From her, they learned that Sunshine is approximately 5 months old, 10 lbs., and has Demodex mange. And, more than likely, she is full of worms. Lab work and blood work will tell more.
One more thing is for sure though, this group who is always there to help pets in upstate South Carolina now need the community's help to treat Sunshine. She is now the property of The Community Pet Project.
Sunshine was taken to Hillcrest Animal Hospital located at 1211 E. Georgia Rd. in Simpsonville (Phone: (864) 967-7387). As treatment, Sunshine will receive multiple medicated baths, antibiotics, pain meds, nausea medicine, worming, blood & lab work and shots.
Sunshine will eventually be spayed and groomed. Then TCPP will help in finding this sweet girl a forever home.
So, please, if you will, help The Community Pet Project on her new path to a forever family. Donations can be called or mailed directly to Hillcrest or made to The Community Pet Project via any of the below means. Just know, however you decide to give, it is greatly appreciated.
https://www.facebook.com/TheCommunityPetProject/app_117708921611213 - Donations accepted online.
https://www.facebook.com/TheCommunityPetProject/app_117708921611213?ref=ts - Donations accepted via mobile.
Or donations can be mailed to:
The Community Pet Project
26 Halehaven Dr.
Simpsonville, SC 29681
Since they're a 501c3, deductions are tax deductible.
Be sure to share Sunshine with your friends. Social media is an excellent fundraising tool, and has saved many lives simply by sharing an animal in need with others.
You can follow Sunshine on the TCPP Facebook page.


text:
Aloha Bay, Palm Wax Candle, White Lotus, 17 oz
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- Loyalty credit is equal to 10% of the value of your order, excluding shipping charges.
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Shipping Weight:?2.69 lbs (1.22 kg)
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- Product Code: ALH-20100
- UPC Code: 760860201008
- Package Quantity: 17 oz
- Dimensions: 2.3 x 2.3 x 8.1 in, 1.6 lbs (0.73 kg)
- 100% Vegetable Palm Wax
- Fair Trade
- Non-GMO
- Vegan and Kosher
- Symbol of Unfolding Energies
- Burntime: 100 Hours
Burns with a hotter, cleaner flame.
Holds more fragrance than paraffin or soy wax.
Unlike soy wax, Palm Wax is produced by steam distillation, so it does not require petro-chemical solvents.
Fair Trade:
This Palm Wax Candle is hand made in rural Indonesia, where the employees enjoy humane working conditions, regular 40 hour work weeks, good wages, free health care and other important benefits.
We engineer our candles to minimize soot emissions. No petroleum products, no lead wicks.
Caution: Do not use if damaged. Burn on heat-resistant surface. Minimize potential soot damage by keeping wick trimmed to 1/4". Avoid drafts. Keep out of reach of children and pets. Keep jar free of wick trimmings & other debris. Never leave burning candle unattended.
I loved the candle, its large and nice and burns for sooo long. But the shape is a bit impractical, so you will need those jumbo sized matches to relight it once you have burned like 1/3 of it, because its hard to reach the bottom of the glass tube with a regular match. Apart from that it is all good. (Unscented)
it's wonderful
Posted by Reviewer1682718 on Oct 19, 2012
burns clean and beautiful and for a very long time
Pretty but...
Posted by Reviewer1270081 on May 25, 2012
I loved the candle, its large and nice and burns for sooo long. But the shape is a bit impractical, so you will need those jumbo sized matches to relight it once you have burned like 1/3 of it, because its hard to reach the bottom of the glass tube with a regular match. Apart from that it is all good. (Unscented)
Posted by Reviewer2478642 on Oct 19, 2011
Very happy with this candle, there is no soot, and the candle itself looks great. So happy iherb carries aloha bay candles.


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There are several good drugs that are effective in treating HBV. These drugs can suppress the virus to undetectable levels just as the HIV drugs do. Three of the drugs active against HBV are also good HIV drugs. This is very convenient for individuals with both HIV and HBV. These three drugs are lamivudine/3TC (Epivir), tenofovir (Viread) and emtricitibine/FTC (Emtriva). A combination product of tenofovir and emtricitibine called Truvada is approved for HIV disease and is also a great combo for HBV. Adefovir (Hepsera) has modest activity against HBV. Two other drugs, entecavir (Baraclude) and telbivudine (Tyzeka) have potent activity against HBV. Another product, alpha-interferon, also has activity against HBV. This drug with be discussed in more detail in the next article on hepatitis C. Some patients may be cured by the treatment by one or a combination of these drugs.
1) If you have HIV infection, talk to your medical provider about getting tested for HBV and then vaccination. If you do not have HIV but are at high risk for HBV infection (intravenous drug user, gay men, commercial sex workers), you may also want to consider getting vaccinated.
2) If you need the vaccine, be sure to get all three vaccinations
3) If you have HIV and HBV, make sure to treat your HIV and your HBV as well
4) Practice safe sex!!! If you inject drugs, use clean needles or learn to use bleach to clean your works. Seek medical treatment for substance abuse.
The next article will discuss hepatitis C infection with HIV disease.
By Dr. Keith Crawford, BDO HIV Expert
Dr. Crawford received a B.S degree in Biology from Cornell University and a B.S. in Pharmacy from Temple University. He completed a residency in clinical pharmacy at the National Institutes of Health. He earned a doctorate in Pharmacology from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, studying microbial biochemistry and genetics.
He is currently in the Department of Clinical Pharmacology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where he develops clinical research studies to improve treatment of HIV infection. He is also on faculty at Howard University College of Medicine, in the Department of Pharmacology.


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Have you wondered whatever happened to Pamela Anderson? The former Baywatch babe seemed to fall of the radar in recent years. On Jan. 11 the blonde bombshell re-emerged and according to E! News, she has remarried Rick Salomon.
Anderson, sporting short-cropped hair, showed up to Sean Penn's Help Haiti Gala. It was there that she announced her re-marriage to Rick Salomon. The pair were married very briefly in 2007, only to divorce two months later.
Rick Salomon is an American film producer and has had a few relationships with famous women. He was briefly married to Shannen Doherty but is most famous for a leaked sex-tape with ex-girlfriend Paris Hilton.
Pamela is known for her on-again, off-again relationships. Even after divorcing Salomon, the pair have been romantically linked for years. This is nothing new for her though, as she went through the same cycle with ex-husband and father of her children, Tommy Lee.
Pamela Anderson told E! News in regard to her marriage to Salomon, ""We're very happy. Our families are very happy and that's all that matters."


text:
Our latest articles...
Using Windows' powerful Recovery Environment
All current versions of Windows offer a built-in, independently bootable command-line environment that you can use for heavy-duty troubleshooting and maintenance tasks. This specialized system isn't for everyone; there's no graphical interface and scant built-in help. But if you're an experienced user, you might find that this relatively obscure option offers faster and more extensive troubleshooting than more traditional methods — especially when standard Windows won't boot.Read More
Other articles in this issue:
Recent top stories
An update on anti-malware application testing
AV-Comparatives has posted its May results for popular AV-applications, and Microsoft's MSE does surprisingly well. But anti-malware testing is not an exact science — it's more of a guideline on the current state of AV products.Read More
As with summer days, June's patching heats up
In my corner of the U.S., June is when summer really starts to sizzle. But up in the cooler northwest, it's Microsoft that's heating up, with sixteen security bulletins for Windows and Office — and many of the fixes are for vulnerabilities we've patched numerous times before.Read More
Understanding MS product end-of-life dates
Microsoft is clear and upfront about when its products reach their end of life. Here's what Windows 7 users should know. Also, a mostly forgotten app provides detailed system information, and why the LinkedIn purchase highlights a scary and murky trend.Read More
Build 14361: Another preview of future Windows
New Win10 Preview builds give us a clearer picture of what we'll likely see in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update edition, due out in late July. On June 8, Microsoft announced the release of Win10 Insider Preview build 14361, which includes a few new user-interface changes and lots of bug fixes.Read More
Pros/cons: Using Slack for business messaging
For many in business, the primary form of communication is still email — and to a much lesser extent, text messaging. To improve communications and collaboration among teams, there are dozens of digital collaboration tools. But the one that's gotten the most attention recently is Slack, a business-centric messaging system that nicely complements traditional forms of communication.Read More


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International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 145702, 9 pages
MDS-Based Wormhole Detection Using Local Topology in Wireless Sensor Networks
College of Computer Science, National University of Defense Technology, Hunan 410073, China
Received 28 September 2012; Accepted 27 November 2012
Academic Editor: Shuai Li
Copyright © 2012 Xiaopei Lu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Wormhole attack is a severe threat to wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which has received considerable attentions in the literature. However, most of the previous approaches either require special hardware devices or depend on rigorous assumptions on the network settings, which greatly limit their applicability. In this work, we attempt to relax the limitations in prior work, and propose a novel approach to detect wormhole attacks by only local topology information in WSNs. The basic idea is as follows. Each node locally collects its neighborhood information and reconstructs the neighborhood subgraph by multidimensional scaling (MDS). Potential wormhole nodes are detected by validating the legality of the reconstruction. Then, a refinement process is introduced to filter the suspect nodes and to remove false positives. Our approach solely relies on the local connectivity information and is extremely simple and lightweight, which makes it applicable in practical systems. Extensive simulations are conducted, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of our approach.
1. Introduction
Wormhole attack is a severe threat to wireless networks, which has attracted considerable attentions since it was introduced in previous works [1]. Recently, wormhole attack has become a more critical problem, especially in large-scale WSNs [2]. In a wormhole attack, the adversary places two radio transceivers, which are connected through high-speed channel. Each transceiver, captures signals in the network and delivers them to the other end. These signals are replayed, respectively, at the two ends. Then, two distant sensor nodes that are, respectively, around these two transceivers will consider each other as a close neighbor. By building these tunnels, wormhole attacker can fundamentally change the network connectivity, create a set of shortcut paths, attract a large amount of network traffic, and launch many kinds of attacks, such as selectively dropping or modifying packets and breaking the order of packets. Moreover, by attracting network traffic and collecting and analyzing network data, the attacker can perform many other more aggressive and severe attacks, such as denial of service attacks, network hijacking, and man-in-the-middle attacks. Since wormhole attacks are independent of the MAC layer protocol and immune to the cryptographic techniques, most of traditional security mechanisms are vulnerable to them.
To address wormhole attack in WSNs, a number of countermeasures have been proposed in the literature. Those solutions are respectively based on catching different symptoms of wormhole attack. However, most of them have various limitations, for example, requiring additional hardware devices, depending on special assumptions on the network settings. For instance, a number of methods are based on additional hardware devices, such as GPS [3], special radio frequency (RF) hardware [4], and directional antennas [5], which all significantly increase the hardware cost of the systems. Another kind of solutions depends on special assumptions on the network, such as global tight clock synchronization [6], special guarding nodes [7, 8], and attack-free initial networks [9, 10], which all greatly limit their applicability. In order to relax these limitations, a number of topology-based solutions are proposed [11–16]. These methods can detect wormholes by capturing various symptoms on the network topology, by only exploring the network topology information. However, most of them still have various limitations, for example, centralized algorithms, requiring unit disk graph (UDG) model or relatively high node density, high false positive rate, and so forth. To sum up, wormhole attack has not been well addressed presently, especially in large-scale practical systems.
In this work, we propose a purely new topology-based wormhole detection approach in WSNs. We basically focus on exploring the abnormal structures introduced by wormhole attacks to the network topology. Each node locally collects its -hop neighborhood information and obtains the neighborhood subgraph. Then, we construct an estimation distance matrix that consists of the shortest distances (i.e., hop counts) of all node pairs in this subgraph. Next, the estimation distance matrix is used to reconstruct the subgraph and embed it on a plane by multidimensional scaling (MDS), during which each node will be assigned a virtual position (i.e., node coordinates). The basic idea of our wormhole detection approach is based on an important observation as follows. If node is a normal node, the layout of the MDS would well accord with the estimation distances, which means the distortion factor of the reconstruction would be relatively small. Otherwise, if node is a wormhole node, its neighborhood subgraph cannot be smoothly embedded on a plane or at least would produce a great distortion factor. Based on this observation, we can detect potential wormhole nodes by validating whether the distortion factor of each node exceeds a threshold. Finally, we propose a simple but novel necessary condition for wormhole links and utilize it to filter the suspect nodes in a refinement process. Then, all wormhole nodes and wormhole links can be explicitly identified, with almost no false positives. Figure 1 briefly illustrates the detection results by our approach and the state-of-the-art methods. Black points in the gray regions denote real wormhole nodes, and circles denote detected wormhole nodes by wormhole detection algorithms. The given network graphs in Figures 1(a)–1(d), respectively, present the detection results by MDS-VOW method [12], LCT method [16], and our approach. We can see that MDS-VOW method can hardly work on this kind of wormhole attack, LCT method can detect all wormhole nodes, but with many false positives, and our approach can effectively detect all wormhole nodes with no false positives.
The main contributions of this work are as follows. Our approach does not require any additional hardware devices, but only needs each node to locally collect its -hop neighborhood information. The algorithm is very simple and the overhead is extremely low, which makes it very applicable in practical WSNs. Moreover, not only can our approach identify all wormhole nodes and wormhole links, but also it produces very few false positives (almost no false positives according to extensive simulations).
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. We discuss related works in Section 2 and introduce the problem formulation in Section 3. Section 4 presents our detection approach in details. We evaluate this design through extensive simulations in Section 5 and conclude this work in Section 6.
2. Related Work
2.1. Wormhole Detection
A number of countermeasures have been proposed in the literatures. Existing methods are all based on capturing various symptoms induced by wormholes. In this section, we review and analyze the prior work.
The first line of existing solutions is based on the distance or timing analysis of data transmissions. Some methods attempt to detect wormhole attacks by validating the legality of packet traverse distance or time. By appending the location or time information of the sending nodes in each packet, they verify whether the hop-by-hop transmission is physically possible and accordingly detect the wormholes. However, such methods require the preknowledge of node locations by special hardware devices such as GPS [3, 6] or depend on the assumption of accurate globally synchronized clocks to capture the packet propagation time [4, 6]. These methods significantly increase the hardware cost of sensor nodes, and it is unclear whether these techniques would be effective in resource constraint WSNs.
Another line of existing solutions uses special communication devices. Some methods provide physical layer mechanism by using special radio frequency hardware to perform authentications in packet modulation and demodulation [6]. Hu and Evans [5] propose to adopt directional antennas to find and prevent infeasible communication links. The requirement of special hardware devices limits the applicability of these methods.
The third line of existing solutions is based on the discovery and maintenance of node neighborhood. For instance, LiteWorp [7] assumes that the network is attack-free before a time point, and each node collects its 2-hop neighbors. Then, LiteWorp selects a number of guard nodes to detect wormhole channels by overhearing the infeasible transmissions among those nonneighboring nodes. MobiWorp [8] is further proposed to complement LiteWorp by introducing some location-aware mobile nodes. Obviously, the assumption of attack-free environment significantly limits the applicability of these methods.
The forth line of existing solutions detects wormhole attacks by observing the symptom of traffic flow mismatch based on statistical analysis on the network traffic. For instance, Buttyan et al. [9] propose to detect wormhole attacks by capturing the abnormal increase of neighbor number and the decrease of the shortest path lengths that are induced by wormhole channels. This method is centralized because the base station needs to detect wormhole attacks by hypothesis testing based on the prestatistics of normal networks. Another statistical approach [10] is based on the observation that the wormhole links are selected for routing with abnormally high frequency. They identify wormhole links by comparing them with normal network statistics.However, these methods all require the prestatistics of normal network (i.e., attack-free environments).
The last line of existing solutions, which our approach would belong to, is based on the network topology. Wormhole attacks drastically change the network connectivity by introducing fake links among nodes near wormhole antennas, which will result in various abnormal symptoms to the network topology. Lazos et al. [11] present a graph-based framework to tackle wormhole attacks. They assume that a number of guard nodes that have extraordinary communication range exist in the network. The direct communication links between guard nodes and regular nodes would form special geometric structures, and the presence of wormholes would break these structures. Wang and Bhargava propose MDS-VOW [12] to reconstruct the whole network using MDS technique and detect wormhole links by capturing the abnormal features of the "network layout" introduced by wormholes. However, this method is centralized, and it can only work for special cases with only one infected node at both ends of the wormhole attack. In [13], the authors propose a wormhole detection approach with only local connectivity information. In networks with UDG model, their approach can accurately detect wormholes by looking for "forbidden substructures" that should not be present in a normal connectivity graph. However, it is inaccurate under non-UDG graph. Dong et al. [14] propose a distributed connectivity-based wormhole detection method. Each node collects its -hop neighborhood and checks whether the boundary of its -hop neighborhood subgraph has one or two circles. Its basic idea is based on the observation that the neighborhood that encloses a wormhole link will have two cycles and single cycle otherwise. However, Wormcircle requires relatively high node density to ensure that boundary detection algorithm works well. In another work [15], they propose to leverage global topological properties to detect wormhole attacks. They consider a legitimate multihop wireless network deployed on the surface of a geometric terrain as a 2-manifold surface of genus 0. Wormholes would introduce singularities or higher genus into the network topology. Ban et al. [16] propose local connectivity test (LCT) to identify wormhole attacks. Their basic idea is that removing the wormhole would disconnect its neighborhood from two components. Their algorithm works well in relatively dense and regular networks but results in many false positives in sparse or random networks.
To sum up, the wormhole attack problem has not been perfectly addressed presently. Existing solutions have various limitations, which make them lack applicability in practical WSNs. In this work, we attempt to propose a new wormhole detection approach to relax the limitations in prior work.
2.2. MDS and Its Applications
Multidimensional scaling was originally a method for visualizing dissimilarity data, which was developed from the behavioral and social sciences for studying the structure of objects. MDS takes a dissimilarity matrix among objects as input and produces a layout of the objects in a low-dimensional space as output. Its basic goal is to create a configuration of objects in a low-dimensional space (e.g., one, two, or three dimensions), and the distances between object pairs are close to the original dissimilarities.
Recently, MDS was applied in WSNs for solving the localization problem. As a fundamental problem in wireless networks, localization problem has been widely studied [17–22]. Shang et al. [17] propose a MDS-based localization algorithm that only relies on mere connectivity information and well tolerates measurement error. Ji and Zha [18] propose a distributed MDS-based sensor localization mechanism that presents a multivariate optimization-based iterative algorithm to calculate the positions of the sensors. In this work, we apply MDS to reconstruct the neighborhood subgraph of each node in WSNs. The input is the distance matrix of all node pairs, and the output is a set of virtual positions of all nodes. The virtual positions are used to calculate a virtual distance matrix of all node pairs. Then, the dissimilarity of these two distance matrices is utilized to evaluate the legality of the reconstruction.
3. Problem Formulation
3.1. Network Model
In our model, a WSN consists of a set of sensor nodes deployed over a plane region. Each node has a unique identity (ID). Nodes are only capable of communicating with other nodes in their proximity. We use to denote the communication graph, where vertices and edges depict the nodes and communication links, respectively. We do not require the sensor nodes to be equipped with any special hardware, or achieve accurate globally synchronized clocks. Moreover, we do not place any restrictions on the network settings or topology, for example, static or dynamic nodes, node density, communication model, the uniformity of deployment, attack-free initial environment, and so forth. We set an assumption to the network as follows.
Each vertex in the network is capable of collecting its -hop neighbor information. We use to denote the neighbors of vertex that are away from within hops in . Let be a vertex set in , and let be the vertex-induced subgraph by , which consists of vertexes in and edges among them. The -hop neighborhood subgraph of vertex is denoted by . This assumption is common in the literatures and is realistic in practical WSNs. It is worth noting that would be a relatively small value, for example, is sufficient for our algorithm, which makes our approach extremely lightweight.
3.2. Threat Model
In this work, wormhole attacks are defined based on the minimum capabilities required by the attacker to perform these attacks. In particular, the attacker does not need to compromise any node or have any knowledge of the network protocol used. Wormhole endpoints deployed by the adversary do not have valid network identities and do not become part of the network. We assume that in the network exist mechanisms that authenticate legitimate nodes and establish secure links between authenticated nodes. Although wormhole attacks impact neighboring discovery mechanisms in the physical or link layer greatly, transmitted data over encrypted network protocols remain transparent and unobservable to the wormhole attacker. These assumptions are common in prior work [3–6, 12, 13].
Then, we set an assumption on the threat model as follows. Each wormhole link in network is long enough to well separate nodes at the two ends of it. We denote nodes at the two ends of by and and denote the shortest distance between and by . Then, we assume that , where 2 presents the length of the wormhole attack, that is, the shortest distance between nodes at the two ends of the wormhole without wormhole links. The length of the wormhole determines the threat level of the wormhole attack. Longer wormholes are more dangerous because they have larger impact range and longer impact distance. For a short wormhole attack, its impact on the network connectivity would be negligible since only a small fraction of nodes are affected.
4. Local MDS-Based Wormhole Detection
In this section, we present the analysis and design details of our MDS-based wormhole detection approach.
4.1. Overview of Our Approach
Wormhole attacks introduce essential changes to the network topology. In order to detect wormhole attacks by only topology information, we have to capture the typical topological characteristics of wormhole links. The main idea of our detection approach is based on an observation as follows.
Each node in the network collects its -hop neighborhood information, in particular, . The shortest distances (i.e., hop count) between all node pairs in the neighborhood subgraph are used to construct an estimation distance matrix. Then, the distance matrix is used to reconstruct the subgraph by applying MDS on the subgraph and embedding it on a plane. There would be two conditions. First, if is a normal node, the reconstructed subgraph would be relatively approximating to the original network. Thus, the embedded distance between each node pair would be relatively close to their estimation distance. Otherwise, if is a wormhole node, its 2-hop neighborhood subgraph would contain all the wormhole nodes. Topologically, each wormhole node would connect with all nodes at the other end. Therefore, if we still constrainedly embed the subgraph on a plane, the distance constraints cannot be well maintained during the reconstruction. Based on this observation, we let all nodes in the network perform local MDS-based reconstruction and detect potential wormhole nodes according to the legality of their reconstructions. Additionally, we introduce a simple and effective necessary condition of wormholes to filter the suspect nodes detected by the previous process. Through this refinement process, we can remove most of false positives and identify all wormhole links.
As discussed previously, our detection approach mainly includes two components: (1) performing local MDS-based reconstruction and (2) performing refinement process. The first component obtains a number of suspect wormhole nodes. The second component filters the suspect nodes and presents the final detection results. We, respectively, describe these two components in detail as follows.
4.2. Local MDS-Based Reconstruction
For ease of representation, we divide this component into three subprocesses, as described hereinafter.
4.2.1. Distance Estimation
For an arbitrary node in network , it first collects its -hop neighborhood information and obtains its -hop neighborhood subgraph . Next, a classical shortest-path algorithm, for example, Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm, is applied to calculate the shortest distances between all node pairs in . Then, the shortest distance matrix is constructed, which is an matrix ( denotes the number of nodes). Each element in is utilized as the estimation distance between each node pair.
4.2.2. Network Reconstruction
Using the shortest distance matrix as input parameter, we apply MDS to reconstruct the -hop neighborhood subgraph of . We denote the reconstructed network by , in which each node would be assigned a virtual position (i.e., node coordinations). Then, the Euclidian distance between each node pair is calculated in , and a virtual distance matrix is produced.
4.2.3. Wormhole Judgement
Then, we describe how to decide whether a node is a wormhole node candidate by its reconstructed neighborhood subgraph. First, the distortion factor of the MDS reconstruction is calculated for each node . The distortion factor is defined as follows.
Definition 1 (distortion factor). The distortion factor is defined as the root mean square error (RMSE) between the shortest distance matrix and the reconstructed virtual distance matrix , that is, .
As discussed previously, each node produces large distortion factor if it is a wormhole node and little distortion factor otherwise. Based on this observation, we set a predefined threshold and label nodes that produce distortion factors above this threshold as suspect wormhole nodes. In our experiment, we set the threshold to be the median value of the distortion factors of all nodes in , that is, and , , respectively.
Then, we present an efficient way to generate the threshold and distribute it to all nodes. Each node floods a message that contains its distortion factor and records the maximum and minimum values of all distortion factors in all flooding messages it receives. Each node only relays messages that contain a new maximum or minimum value. Thus, only two messages that, respectively, contain the globally maximum and minimum values would be flooded to the whole network. After the flooding is finished, each node calculates the threshold from the maximum and minimum values it records and compares it with its own distortion factor. If its distortion factor exceeds the threshold, it is labeled as a suspect wormhole node and normal node otherwise.
After the implement of this component, a number of suspect wormhole nodes are produced.
4.3. Performing Refinement Process
There is still an issue to be addressed. Some normal nodes may be wrongly labeled as suspect wormhole nodes, and false positives will be introduced. Too many false positives would result in normal links being removed and consequentially degrade the network capacity. In order to address this issue, we introduce this refinement process to filter the suspect nodes and remove false positives. By fully investigating the topology changes introduced by wormholes, we are able to capture some typical topological characteristics of wormhole links. Let and denote two sets that, respectively, contain wormhole nodes at the two ends of a wormhole in network ; let denote the edge set between an arbitrary node pair and . Then, we present Theorem 2.
Theorem 2. Given a network graph and two wormhole node sets and , the following two conditions hold.(1)The subgraph that contains node set and edge set is a complete bipartite subgraph of .(2)In the subgraph , which is constructed by removing all edges in from , the -hop neighbor sets of an arbitrary vertex pair and have no common elements, that is, .
Proof. We first prove condition 1. Because and , respectively, contain and only contain nodes at the two ends of a wormhole, each node at one end is given the illusion that all nodes at the other end are its direct neighbors. Thus, there will be an edge between and each node at the other end. According to the construction of , it will obviously be a complete bipartite subgraph of .
We then prove condition 2. If there are two nodes and and , the shortest distance between and must be less than , that is, . Consequentially, the shortest distance between node sets and would be less than , that is, , which will contradict with our assumption in the threat model.
Theorem 2 is a necessary condition of wormholes and is utilized to filter suspect wormhole nodes. First, all connected components are found in these suspect nodes. We denote the set of such connected components by . Isolated nodes can be certainly excluded. Next, all maximal complete bipartite subgraphs (MCBSs) are found in these connected components. In order to improve the detection rate, we expand each connected component by adding all 1-hop neighbors of the nodes in the component into this component. By doing this, all wormhole nodes can be included in the component if at least one wormhole node at both ends of the wormhole is suspect node. The algorithm in [23] that finds the maximal complete bipartite subgraphs in any graph is applied on each . Let be the set of maximal complete bipartite subgraphs generated by this algorithm, and let be an element in , where and are the two partitions of the bipartite graph. Then, condition 2 in Theorem 2 is applied on each . If , all nodes in will be labeled as final wormhole nodes. Otherwise, they are excluded. Till now, the final detection results are produced.
Moreover, our ultimate goal of detecting wormhole attacks is to neutralize them without breaking regular network functions. In particular, we want to eliminate the high volume of traffic passing through the wormhole links that create the wormhole effect with keeping the sensing and computational capabilities of the nodes. After detecting all wormhole nodes, this can be easily done by removing edges in each bipartite subgraph .
4.4. Algorithm and Discussion
We present Algorithm 1 that describes our wormhole detection approach. Then, several parameters that may influence the performance of our algorithm are discussed as follows.
First, we discuss the influence of . In our simulations, is set to be small constant . The reasons are twofold. First, small introduces low communication overhead of each node for collecting its -hop neighborhood information. Second, if is a wormhole node, its 2-hop neighbors would cover all wormhole nodes. Therefore, setting is sufficient for capturing the abnormal embedding chrematistics induced by this wormhole. Actually, setting to be a larger value is even adverse to the detection, because larger induces larger subgraph, which will reduce the proportion of wormhole nodes in the subgraph and accordingly degrade the distinguishability of wormhole nodes.
Then, we discuss the influence of . The selection of the threshold dramatically impacts the detection accuracy of our approach. In particular, lower threshold guarantees to catch all wormhole nodes, but causes more false positives, which will increase the workload of refinement process. Otherwise, a higher threshold induces fewer false positives but may produce false negatives. Comparatively, we are more concerned with detecting all wormhole nodes. Therefore, our approach will be on the aggressive side and select a relatively lower threshold. In our simulations, the threshold is set to be the median value of all distortion factors. Moreover, it is also a concerning issue, which makes the generation and distribution of the threshold easier.
5. Evaluation
In this section, we conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the effectiveness and performance of our design and compare it with the state-of-the-art methods.
5.1. Simulation Setup
5.1.1. Node Deployment
Two node deployment models are used: perturbed grid and random deployment. Perturbed grid model is adopted [24] to approximate manual deployments of nodes, in which all nodes are placed on an grid and perturbed around their initial positions with a perturbed ratio . Let each cell in the grid be a square with edge length . Then, the node with coordinate will be randomly placed in the region . In random deployment model, each node is assigned a coordinate randomly drawn from the network field.
5.1.2. Communication Model
Although our approach does not require specific communication models, both UDG and quasi-UDG models are adopted to build the networks. In the UDG model, there is a link between nodes and if and only if their distance is no larger than , where is the communication radius. In quasi-UDG model, nodes and have a link if their distance is no larger than and have a link with probability if their distance is within , where .
5.1.3. Wormhole Position
The wormhole position is a crucial factor for wormhole detection, because it could impact the significance of wormhole symptoms. Especially when multiple wormholes exist in the network, their relative position will dramatically influence the wormhole detection. In the simulations, our approach is evaluated for detecting wormholes placed at different positions of the network. Moreover, multiple wormholes with different relative positions are also evaluated.
5.2. Simulation Results
In this subsection, we present the results of the simulations under various network settings and compare them with the state-of-the-art MDS-VOW [12] and LCT [16] methods.
The basic network contains 1600 nodes deployed over a square region. In all simulations, for perturbed grid model, and for quasi-UDG model. The average node degree varies from 4 to 13. A set of wormhole nodes are placed at the diagonal of the network. The average number of wormhole nodes is 15. We require all algorithms to detect wormholes that are not shorter than 8 hops, that is, the shortest distance between nodes at the two ends of the wormhole is not less than 8. All simulations take 100 runs with random network generation and present the average results.
First, four sets of simulations are conducted to evaluate the number of false positives of our approach. Each set of simulations adopts different node deployments and communication models. The results are, respectively, presented in Figures 2(a)–2(d). From the results, we can obtain several observations as follows.
5.2.1. Influence of Node Density
The results in Figure 2 indicate that the number of false positives decreases for all approaches as the node degree increases. And our approach always greatly outperforms LCT method. However, when the degree is very low, there are still some false positives. The reason is analyzed as follows. In extremely sparse networks, there would be some special cases called bridge links, as shown in Figure 3. Although it is a normal link in the network, it topologically accords with the property of wormhole links. Some of these links may be wrongly labeled as wormhole candidates in MDS-based reconstruction and cannot be filtered by the refinement process.
5.2.2. Influence of Node Deployment
It is shown in Figure 2 that our approach always produces few false positives for both perturbed grid distribution and random distribution. LCT produces fewer false positives for perturbed grid model than random deployment model. The reason is that perturbed grid model produces more regular networks.
5.2.3. Influence of Communication Model
Figure 2 demonstrates that our approach is not clearly influenced by the communication model. And it also demonstrates that our approach always induces much fewer false positives under both UDG and quasi-UDG models.
Then, we evaluate the number of false negatives of our approach, as shown in Figures 2(e) and 2(f). The results show that our approach can always detect all wormhole attacks. More results are constant under UDG model and are omitted here. The MDS-VOW method cannot even detect any wormholes because it does not work for the general wormhole model.
More simulations are conducted by placing wormholes at different positions in the network. The results are constant and are omitted due to the space limit. To sum up, our approach still works well in sparse and irregular networks and is not clearly influenced by the communication model. Moreover, our approach produces few false positives. It is worth noting that LCT method can obtain better results by increasing the shortest length of wormholes required to be detected. However, that will greatly restrict its applicability and increase the communication and computation cost.
5.3. Multiple Wormholes
In this subsection, our approach is evaluated for detecting multiple wormholes.
When the distance between two different wormholes is long enough, they will not affect each other. Thus, our approach can well detect all wormhole nodes, as shown in Figures 4(a)–4(c). Otherwise, if multiple wormholes are close, they may interfere with each other, which makes the detection more difficult. Particularly, if the distances of both ends of the wormholes are relatively short, as shown in Figure 4(d), our approach fails to detect the wormholes. The reason is as follows. When both ends of two wormholes are very close to each other, wormhole nodes at different ends are connected by short paths through wormhole links in the adjacent wormhole. Therefore, these nodes would be filtered during the refinement process. Actually, to the best of our knowledge, this situation cannot be solved by any purely topology-based detection methods.
6. Conclusions
As a severe threat to WSNs, wormhole attack has received considerable attentions during the past decade. However, most of existing countermeasures lack applicability for requiring special hardware devices or depending on rigorous assumptions on the network. In this work, we fundamentally analyze the essential wormhole symptoms by topological methodology and propose a local MDS-based wormhole detection approach. Our approach does not depend on any hardware requirements and is extremely simple and lightweight, which make it quite feasible in practical WSNs. Extensive simulations are conducted, and the results show that our approach can effectively identify all wormhole nodes for a large class of network instances.
The first author is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grants no. 60903224 and no. 61202484. D. Dong is supported by NSFC under Grants no. 61272482 and no. 61170261.
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- D. Eppstein, "Arboricity and bipartite subgraph listing algorithms," Information Processing Letters, vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 207–211, 1994. View at Publisher · View at Google Scholar · View at Scopus
- Y. Zhang, W. Liu, W. Lou, and Y. Fang, "Location-based compromise-tolerant security mechanisms for wireless sensor networks," IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 247–260, 2006. View at Publisher · View at Google Scholar · View at Scopus


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San Sebastian: A World Away in 15 Minutes
Published May 30, 2008 - (Updated Dec 21, 2012)
Until recently, I hadn't had the pleasure of knowing this neat, former silver-mining town in the mountains that's as pretty and peaceful as I'd imagined real traditional Mexico could be. I had long wanted to go there, especially in the summer because it's about 12 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than Puerto Vallarta. But dreading the arduous drive on rough, winding road, it didn't happen until Vallarta Adventures made it easy and flew me there on their five-hour air expedition, which makes it possible for folks of all ages and stamina levels to have an experience of a lifetime and yet be back in Vallarta for afternoon siesta.
What a treat to get a bird's-eye view of the lay of the land, dense ribbons of vegetation mirroring Sierra Madre climatic zones – initially sub-tropical with lots of palms, then thorn forest, followed by pines, oaks and walnut trees. I bet the Spanish, who took a hundred years – give or take – to get here from the coast, would have appreciated the 15-minute flight, too!
Landing on the newly paved airstrip, a bouncy bilingual guide takes a maximum of 13 on a leisurely stroll, showing the major points of interest and introducing residents eager to share their hometown's history. And because it turns 400 next year, there's a lot of it! Following a visit to a fascinating family museum where the elderly matriarch proudly shares her treasures, the tour culminates with a lunch of Mexico's most popular dishes.
During its heyday in the 1700s, San Sebastian's 30,000 population was bigger than even Guadalajara's. But with the Mexican Revolution came the demise of the European-run mines. And today fewer than a thousand remain, anchored by the area's agricultural tradition.
One family runs a generations-old coffee plantation, also growing indigenous tangy-sweet arrayan and limas, an orange-lemon hybrid – everything done the old-fashioned way. Resulting souvenir possibilities include the crystallized fruit candy and coffee that you get to sample on the tour.
Clean and tidy, San Sebastian's adobe buildings are sparkling white, its mountain air alive with birdsong. With lots of roses and benches and a particularly ornate gazebo, its main square is one of the most inviting I've seen, its pastel-colored church exceptional, too.
Also noteworthy? The town's sole "gas station" – a courtyard of fuel-filled jerry cans. But the road being built connecting San Sebastian with both Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara is bound to change that. So you might consider popping into this salt of the earth place before the 21st century has its way with it.


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Artful Designs came up with this really sleek looking sexy outfit. I just love the shirt, and the pants have great details. The hair is from Tameless and the skin is from Dulce Secrets.
Outfit: Slither 100L @ Artful Designs http://slurl.com/secondlife/Homerlone/84/104/3213
Skin: Addyn (Riesling) 350L @ Dulce Secrets http://slurl.com/secondlife/Angels/15/23/22
Hair: Alexandria 199L @ Tameless http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dreyfus/239/180/1507


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New song by Kelly Clarkson – enjoy!
Monthly Archives: November 2012
Limited Edition
Shopping or Hiding?
The Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States is termed Black Friday, and signals the start of the holiday shopping season. It's become rather controversial the last few years as stores open earlier and earlier. This year, instead of beginning Black Friday sales at midnight, some stores opened on Thanksgiving evening.
My local online paper featured several stories about people who began camping out as early as Wednesday afternoon in front of Best Buy to be first in line for the sales. Just the thought of it made me cringe. Stand in line for concert tickets? Yes, I did that in my youth (and hope to never do so again). But camp for days to get a sale? No.
Happy Thanksgiving America!
Our Canadian neighbors celebrated on October 8 but today is Thanksgiving in America. This year I am thankful for my precious family, friends and a mom who buys ham. I hate turkey. No, seriously, I hate the stuff. I am looking forward to pigging out on stuffing, broccoli cheese casserole and a myriad of other dishes. I know I am very fortunate for the food that will be sitting on the table and for the people that will be sitting around it. I don't really have it easy but I definitely have it good. I am glad that a day is set aside every year to remind me to be grateful for that. Continue reading
Struck mute
Each winter, I suffer from a cold or two, and just occasionally this results in me losing my voice for a week or so. It's that time again, and here I am struck mute. I am still able to, but really should not, whisper, so I limit my verbal communication to a minimum. And even though I am used to this situation by now (having experienced it several times during the last 15 or so years), I still feel weird. Continue reading
This and That –
Hope is alive for the Twinkie and not so much for the greedy scalpers. For you entertainment today, check out ebay where the cost of Twinkies are outrageous. One listing for twenty one million states:
Wikipedia states that "there are also regional differences as to the stuffing or dressing traditionally served with the turkey. Southerners generally make their dressing from cornbread, while those in other parts of the country make stuffing from white, wheat or rye bread as the base. One or several of the following may be added to the dressing/stuffing: oysters, apples, chestnuts, raisins, celery and/or other vegetables, sausage or the turkey's giblets. The traditional Canadian version has bread cubes, sage, onion and celery. Rice is also sometimes used instead of bread in some parts of Canada." Delish talks a little more about the regional differences in the way we fix our Holiday meals.
I have spent Thanksgiving Dinner with family most of my life, but when I wasn't able to travel home, I spent it with friends. I was in my thirties before I had anything other than cornbread dressing. Surprisingly, it was one of my very Southern friends that fixed bread dressing instead of the more standard corn bread dressing. And I have to tell you I wasn't impressed. It was like she took white bread and torn it apart and then put broth over it and warmed it up. To me it was gummy bread.
I checked out Allrecipes.com to see what other recipes are out there.
The first one I found is Oyster dressing and no offense to people who like Oyster dressing – but Blech! I know, don't knock it until you try it, but seeing the slimy, muscle oysters being poured in the dish about did me in. I would have to be very hungry to eat this.
Next up is bread dressing with fruit and nuts. It looks okay, and I like all the ingredients especially the nuts and apricots. So I am reserving judgment on this one.
They also had a recipe for cornbread dressing. However no one in our family uses all cornbread. We use a mixure of cornbread, crackers, biscuits or toasted bread. I tend to use crackers,and biscuits.
I have never eaten rice dressing and really couldn't find a recipe that appeared to be dressing or stuffing. I found one that was wild rice cooked in broth. Then they added grapes, parsley, and nuts. Not sure why this is called rice dressing? Do any of you make a rice dressing?
So, do you eat dressing with your Thanksgiving meal? If so, what type of dressing do you cook?
– – Leigh AAR
What Do You Do With a Pomegranate?
What can I say about the pomegranate? The seeds (the part we eat) are a dark, beautiful shade of red that seems particularly appropriate at this time of year. It's supposedly one of the "super foods," rich in antioxidants. And it can be quite tasty. But just what do you do with a pomegranate?
Fancy Fingernails
t's easy to express yourself these days. We do it through the music we listen to, the clothes we wear, the tattoos we choose, our blogs and tweets and Facebook posts. And some ladies have added their nails as a fun way to advertise their feelings on a variety of subjects.
AAR goes to the movies: Skyfall
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-gLRp5bSpw[/youtube]The best news about Skyfall, the latest James Bond movie, is: It's good. Really good. While I liked Daniel Craig as James Bond from the start, I was not overly impressed by either Casino Royale or Quantum of Solace. Continue reading


text: The Plymouth Superbird is one of those classic American cars from the muscle car era that has captured the imagination of all sorts of automotive enthusiasts long after its presence on roads and race tracks wore away. It's easy to see why. Where else but in the Swingin' Sixties and Seventies would a car leave the factory with an aerodynamics package that included a pointy beak and a rear spoiler that sat several feet above the rear deck?


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More New and Used
from Private Sellers
Note: Supplemental materials are not guaranteed with Rental or Used book purchases.
10th Anniversary
ISBN13:by Patterson, James; Paetro, Maxine
Little, Brown and Company
For every secret Detective Lindsay Boxer's long-awaited wedding celebration becomes a distant memory when she is called to investigate a horrendous crime : a badly injured teenage girl is left for dead, and her newborn baby is nowhere to be found. Lindsay discovers that not only is there no trace of the criminals--but that the victim may be keeping secrets as well. For every lie At the same time, Assistant District Attorney Yuki Castellano is prosecuting the biggest case of her life--a woman who has been accused of murdering her husband in front of her two young children. Yuki's career rests on a guilty verdict, so when Lindsay finds evidence that could save the defendant, she is forced to choose. Should she trust her best friend or follow her instinct? There's a different way to die Lindsay's every move is watched by her new boss, Lieutenant Jackson Brady, and when the pressure to find the baby begins interfering with her new marriage to Joe, she wonders if she'll ever be able to start a family. With James Patterson's white-hot speed and unquenchable action,10th Anniversaryis the most deliciously chilling Women's Murder Club book ever.


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RIP CuzPosted on 4/4/16 - by Richard C Beaman Jr, Major, USAF (Ret)Rest in peace, cuz.
A HeroFor All TimePosted on 5/22/14 - by Gary L.HoetkerIt doesn't seem possible that nearly forty five years have passed. You gave your life to retrieve an allied fallen soldier with no regard to the danger. It's what great men and leaders do...lifting up those in need. You have left an indelible mark in the hearts of those who knew and loved you. Jan and Babe (Frankie) , George and Guy Jr., saw to it that you will be remembered and honored in your hometown for perpetuity. Looking forward to be re-united with you when our earthly lives are finished.MORE
We RememberPosted on 11/24/13 - by Robert SageRonald is buried at Greenlawn Memorial Park, Bakersfield, Kern County, CA.
Ron BeamanPosted on 6/25/12 - by Peggy Derrick Robak firstname.lastname@example.com
You have never been forgotten. We met at a church camp in the 8th grade,and then went to Pepperdine and fell in love. You are truly a hero & a very special man. Rest in peace.
If I should die...remembrances for CAPT. Ronald Ralph BEAMAN, USA...who made the ultimate sacrifice!Posted on 10/24/11 - byIf I should die, and leave you here awhile, be not like others, sore undone, who keep long vigils by the silent dust, and weep...for MY sake, turn again to life, and smile...Nerving thy heart, and trembling hand to do something to comfort other hearts than thine...Complete these dear, unfinished tasks of mine...and I, perchnace, may therein comfort you.MORE
My Big Brother!!Posted on 8/21/10 - by Jan Beaman Bowen firstname.lastname@example.com is hard to describe how it was to be the 'little sister' to Ronny Beaman! Teased, ignored, but more than anything 'protected'. Much more than I ever knew. Because being Ronny's little sister (mind you only 19 months separated us), it was "HANDS OFF" to all of his buddies (and then some other not so good buddies). Now. my brother was VERY popular and had the coolest of buddies, and I often wondered why they never asked me out (thought I just wasn't 'cool' enough-- til one day, one of them told me --- NO WAY could we ask you out. Ronny told us ALL -- I know you guys too well and know what you are after ----DO NOT TOUCH OR GO NEAR MY SISTER!!!! And like good friends they never did -- much to my dismay. He was a wonderful brother, and with today being his birhday (would have been 69) so many memories flood me and I just wish I could tell you all the wonderful things he was to me and those around him. But I'll save some for later. Thank you, Ronny for caring so much!!MORE
Ronny BeamanPosted on 7/10/10 - by joe brennan email@example.com MORE
RonnyPosted on 7/10/10 - by joe brennan firstname.lastname@example.com photo was sent to his very good friend, Frank Hoetker. Ron was drafted out of Pepperdine, and went on to become an officerMORE
My best friend RonnyPosted on 7/7/10 - by Frank Hoetker firstname.lastname@example.com will always be my best friend. Our special bond goes far back to the 1950's. As kids, and then teenagers growing into young men, we shared all the usual fun, especially as little league teammates. I miss him every day. Rest in Peace my dear friend!MORE
ronnie beamanPosted on 7/5/10 - by joe brennan email@example.com, 1969: one of the many fallen heros that year
Not forgottenPosted on 6/27/05 - by Dave Kruger, 196th LIB. 66-67Ronald, Although we never met, I just want you to know you are not forgotten. You gave the ultimate sacrifice, your life for what you believed in. Sleep well my friend, and thank you for protecting the freedoms we have today.MORE
NATIVE AMERICAN PRAYERPosted on 7/15/04 - by Chris Spencer email@example.com is said a man hasn't died as long as he is remembered. This prayer is a way for families, friends and fellow veterans to remember our fallen brothers and sisters. Do not stand at my grave and weep I am not there, I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow. I am the sunlight on ripened grain, I am the gentle autumn rain. When you awaken in the morning hush, I am the swift, uplifting rush of quiet birds in circled flight, I am the stars that shine at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there, I did not dieMORE
The Wall of Faces
Brought to you by the organization that built The Wall, the Vietnam Veterans Virtual Memorial Wall is dedicated to honoring, remembering and sharing the legacies of all those who died in the Vietnam War. Here you can go beyond the names on The Wall to see the faces, share the stories and read the remembrances posted by friends, neighbors, classmates and family members.
All of these photos will be showcased in The Education Center at The Wall on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. To learn more about the effort to collect these photos and ensure their faces will never be forgotten, visit www.buildthecenter.org.


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It's here - after a far too long wait - the next issue of Understanding SharePoint Journal.
The topic this time, as you likely know, is Beginning SharePoint Development. If you are an aspiring developer, or if you have a lot of experience as a developer on other platforms, this issue is for you.
The issue, spanning 128 pages, covers the following aspects of SharePoint development:
You'll also get 21 videos lasting more than 3 hours and 15 minutes, walking you through the steps of the exercises and showing you some additional and useful tips and tricks.
I won't hold you here no more, here is the URL: http://www.beginningsharepointdevelopment.com/


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Bearer bond
A bearer bond is a negotiable security. Unlike a registered bond, which is registered in the name of the owner, a bearer bond is not registered. It may be cashed in by anyone who posses it.
Expanded Definition
In modern times, most bonds are registered. The best known exception is a Treasury bond.
The ease with which bearer bonds may be cashed means their handling requires greater security.
Related Fool Articles
Related Terms
Recent Mentions on Fool.com
- Bearer Bonds: The ?Old School? Bond
- Are Bankers Really Less Honest Than Other Professionals?
- Dear Brian Moynihan: You?ve Done a Good Job so Far, But Now Comes the Hard Part
- Dow Holds Steady After Fed News; Nike Reports, Target in Trouble
- JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs Weigh on the Dow
- The Greatest Bull Market Begins as the Worst Bear Market Ends


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Diabetes: Fish Prevents Kidney Trouble
A new study in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases claims diabetics eating fish twice a week have less risk of kidney disease because they excrete less protein in their urine, a common indicator of kidney trouble; Reuters reports.
Here's what Dr. Fuhrman said about it:
Anytime you add fish, fish oil, DHA supplements, flax or walnuts to a diet you will see dramatic health benefits for a variety of illnesses. This is consistent with other studies, so in that context it is reasonable to advise people to include sources of omega-3 and even DHA in their diet. This can be met with plant sources of omega-3 and a vegan DHA supplement such as DHA Purity or this need can be met with fish or fish oil.
Other foods, like green vegetables, beans, raw nuts and seeds, actually help prevent and reserve diabetes. Now, DHA deficiency has been linked to depression, dyslexia, aggressiveness, alcoholism and even reduced intelligence.
But, before you go fish crazy, be mindful of seafood's pollution issues.


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Read more chapters of 'Cross-Country'
Go Home
Cross Country / A Memoir of France
12: Return to the Square Albin Cachot
By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2012 Paul Ben-Itzak
Mon menage a moi
In November 2001 I returned to the
Square Albin Cachot and the art deco apartment complex -- perfectly situated in the 13eme arrondissement on the verge of the 5th arrondissement and the Latin Quarter without being in it -- where I had first fallen in love with Paris, this time accompanied by my three cats, Sonia, Mesha, and Hopey, who were finally starting to get a bit stressed out by all the moving, this being our third Parisian *demeure* in four months. Sonia, my Siamese and the oldest, panted her tongue like a dog in the cab on the way over down the Boulevard Saint-Jacques - August Blanqui, past the Metro Denfert-Rochereau and over the catacombs which lay below it with their centuries-old skeletons and the not-so-old ghosts of the Resistance whose fighters clandestinely convened there during the Occupation, to the rue Glaciere, then the narrow rue Nordmann across from an elementary school and playground. This time we had a first floor flat, so no spying on the neighbors. During my first sejour on the square I'd observed, besides Kolya's navy blue and terracotta mosaic fountain in the center of the courtyard -- where the Polish immigrant teenager deported by the French under the Occupation used to play with his colleagues -- a playful menage a trois in a lower window across the square of one dark beauty and two skinny guys, a mysterious woman who used to emerge on a distant facing balcony in a blue halter-top and short hip-hugging black skirt to drape her laundry over the stone balcony and gaze up dreamily into the Parisian *crepuscule* (twilight), and, directly facing my 7th-floor flat (from which you could see the tip of the Eiffel Tower if you stood on your tip-toes on the threshold of the balcony), a proper pony-tailed young woman in a white blouse and her husband, who, returning from work, would slip his arms around her waist, provoking a soft smile of surprise on her thin lips.
That was all during my fall 2000 stay on the seventh floor of building six in the square Albin Cachot. Lured by the hope that one of these women with their promise of a Parisian *domicile conjugale* was just waiting to be swept away by me, I was now back in Paris and the square in November 2001. So far my encounters with French women had been mixed. Benedicte, the banker from Vincennes who'd taken me to see "The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain" on our first date, seemed fascinated with me, but I wasn't sure I was attracted to her, nor that we had much in common besides her ribbing my atrocious French in her impeccable English. Sylvie, the Montmartre dancer and usher at the Theatre de la Bastille on whom I'd bestowed one of my sunflowers -- and who actually seemed to be Amelie Poulain -- was my dream girl, at least in appearance, the ideal, in the classic tawny Latin beauty of her face, of the French girl I wanted to fall in love with -- and hoped would fall in love with me. After I'd given her the flower, I left a message with my e-mail address for her at the theater. She responded, in a mail subject-lined "Histoire des tournesols (sunflowers)," with a long letter telling me how strange I was and suggesting we could meet for a drink if I liked at the Cafe de l'Industrie on the rue Sedaine, also near the Bastille. I liked the place -- a cavernous corner cafe with a set of short stairs leading to a second level, a refuge filled with vintage pastis signs that made you feel you were in a roomy ship's hold -- but couldn't tell so far if Sylvie liked me, or was just amused....
On the negative side, the sublet off the Boulevard Pasteur next to the AIDS-discovering Institute Pasteur had not ended well. The proprietor claimed that I had not told her about my three cats; that an uncle who was supposed to stay there after me had arrived and refused to cross the threshold because of the smell from the litter; that I had tried to conceal the scratches Mesha had made on the hideous burlap-like wallpaper in the bedroom by... papering it over with burlap-like wallpaper; and had exploited Sonia's loosening a few threads on the faded sofa with her claws as an opportunity to sink her claws into me and intimidate me into giving her 700 Euros to buy a new couch. "If you don't pay, I have friends in Paris who can make trouble for you," threatened the woman, a school-teacher from Montpellier. It was not the last time I would be bullied by a Frenchman or woman, almost always acquiescing in the end. It would continue right up to my abrupt and ambivalent departure from France in July 2010, an exit greased by the bullying of one of my closest French friends.
Looking back, sometimes I feel like I arrived in Paris with my heart in my hands only to have it devoured like any other choice morsel of a wild beast, an exotic untamed curio rejected and ejected, spit out at the first sign of bitterness or *amertune* -- or, worse, carelessly discarded in the gutter like a played-out cigarette butt that had outlived its utility.
Read more chapters of 'Cross-Country'
Go Home


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On this day: July 25
POSTED: 4:34 PM Jul 24 2012 UPDATED: 11:00 PM Jul 24 2015
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America gives its Army generals five stars, a family favorite amusement park ride is patented, Dylan plugs in, and Roseanne "sings," all on this day.
The views expressed are not those of this site, this station or its affiliated companies. By posting your comments you agree to accept our terms of use.


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Every single weekend, studios wait in anticipation to see impressive numbers at the box office and every weekend, I cannot help but think about Arthur Abbott and his wise words from from "The Holiday" (2006). While I cannot find the exact quote, I can remember him stating that box office success did not dictate the success of whether a film was deemed successful or not. This is not so much the case now, which makes a lot of people yearn for the days of old Hollywood once more. The days where a movie could have a longer run and build up success by word of mouth. People miss the days as Arthur states where the box office results were not reported like "like baseball scores on the nightly news." Despite this, we all eagerly await the results each and every weekend.
The box office results for the the weekend of Jun. 13, 2014 through Jun. 15, 2014 are the following:
- "22 Jump Street" (2014); Weekend Gross: $60M; Overall Gross: $60M; Weeks: 1
- "How to Train Your Dragon 2" (2014); Weekend Gross: $50M; Overall Gross: $50M; Weeks: 1
- "Maleficent" (2014); Weekend Gross: $19M; Overall Gross: $163.5M; Weeks: 3
- "Edge of Tomorrow" (2014); Weekend Gross: $16.2M; Overall Gross: $56.6M; Weeks: 2
- "The Fault in Our Stars" (2014); Weekend Gross: $15.7M; Overall Gross: $81.7M; Weeks: 2
- "X-Men: Days of Future Past" (2013); Weekend Gross: $9.5M; Overall Gross: $205.9M; Weeks: 4
- "Godzilla" (2014); Weekend Gross: $3.2M; Overall Gross: $191.3M; Weeks: 5
- "A Million Ways to Die in the West" (2014); Weekend Gross: $3.1M; Overall Gross: $38.9M; Weeks: 3
- "Neighbors" (2014); Weekend Gross: $2.5M; Overall Gross: $143.1M; Weeks: 6
- "Chef" (2014); Weekend Gross: $2.3M; Overall Gross: $14.1M; Weeks: 6
For a more extensive look at this weekend's box office, please click here.
At this time last year, the box office results were the following:
- "Man of Steel" (2013); Weekend Gross: $116.6M; Overall Gross: $116.6M; Weeks: 1
- "This is the End" (2013); Weekend Gross: $20.7M; Overall Gross: $20.7M; Weeks: 1
- "Now You See Me" (2013); Weekend Gross: $11M; Overall Gross: $80.7M; Weeks: 3
- "Fast & Furious 6" (2013); Weekend Gross: $9.5M; Overall Gross: $219.7M; Weeks: 4
- "The Purge" (2013); Weekend Gross: $8.3M; Overall Gross: $51.9M; Weeks: 2
- "The Internship" (2013); Weekend Gross: $7.1M; Overall Gross: $31M; Weeks: 2
- "Epic" (2013); Weekend Gross: $6.2M; Overall Gross: $95.7M; Weeks: 4
- "Star Trek Into Darkness" (2013); Weekend Gross: $6.2M; Overall Gross: $211M; Weeks: 5
- "After Earth" (2013); Weekend Gross: $4M; Overall Gross: $54.5M; Weeks: 3
- "Iron Man 3" (2013); Weekend Gross: $2.9M; Overall Gross: $399.6M; Weeks: 7
To continue comparing box office statistics from last year to this year, please click here.
For those interested in viewing any of the aforementioned features in theaters, in Austell, the safe bets are always Carmike Cinemas Movies 14 and Regal Stadium 22 in Austell.
If you are interested in renting any of the films mentioned from last year, make sure to check out the titles through Videodrome, Netflix, or movie channels based upon your cable or satellite provider.
To purchase any Blu-rays or DVDs mentioned in this article please check out your local Austell Movie Stop, Best Buy, Walmart, Target, or Kmart.