Mokka mit Schlag » 2008 » December

Ning has proven why you can’t trust your web site (or web application to the cloud). Just listen to Ning’s Gina Bianchini:

We’re not discontinuing the Red Light District because we no longer believe in the freedom to create your own social network for anything as long as it’s legal. We do. Practically though, supporting adult networks no longer makes sense. Here is what we’ve seen in practice to date with respect to adult social networks on Ning:

Adult social networks don’t pull their own weight. Specifically, they require other social networks to work harder because they don’t generate enough advertising or premium service revenue to cover their costs. Plus, our ad partners aren’t big fans of the adult networks and therefore require us to identify adult networks or risk our healthy advertising revenue. We don’t want to be in the policing business and, unchecked, that’s where this is heading.

In other words, Ning just decided to cut off people who’d built sites on top of their platforms, because, hey, they felt like it. The pornography just wasn’t as profitable as they expected.

This isn’t the first time this has happened either. FaceBook and Apple have also shut down useful and popular applications because they just didn’t like them. The only safe and sensible course for anyone running a web site/web application/blog is:
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I’ve gotten so used to finding pretty much everything with either Wikipedia or Google, that sometimes I’m a little shocked when there’s something I can’t find. On Friday I found myself trying to puzzle out the exact location of the UCI Ecological Preserve, allegedly one of the best sites to find Cactus Wrens in Orange County. It’s also a good picture of just what most of Irvine would look like if it hadn’t been irrigated and suburbanized beyond all recognition.

I was able to establish that the preserve was probably on the main campus, and not a remote site, but nothing I found anywhere said more than that; and I’ve been told that UCI has the second largest campus in the U.S. Only Stanford’s is larger. However after looking at Google Maps satellite pictures, I did manage to narrow it down to only a couple of possible undeveloped locations. And with a little on-site reconnaissance I found it. So here’s how you get there:
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I found this leaf mimic moth in my garage a couple of days ago (2008-11-29). On a tree, it would have been practically invisible, but on the white walls of my garage it stuck out like A Thinkpad in an Apple store.

Tentatively, it has been ID’d as 6981 – Prochoerodes forfocaria, though I’m not absolutely certain of that.
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