Page load fail makes it difficult to cook cornbread in the woodstove

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=773619

by JoshTriplett • 12 years ago

243 80 12 years ago

bugs.debian.org

patronagezero3• 12 years ago

Only crazy people put sugar in cornbread:

10" round (iron) skillet

2 eggs

1 cup milk

1/4 cup cooking oil

3/4 teaspoon salt

4 teaspoons baking powder (not baking soda)

1 cup yellow cornmeal

1 cup unbleached white flour (or 1/2 whole wheat + 1/2 white)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees: In a large bowl, beat together the eggs, milk, oil and salt until well blended. Sift in the baking powder and whisk until foamy. Quickly mix in the cornmeal and flour. Beat until the batter is smooth. Pour into an oiled 10" round cast iron skillet. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. (Okay to freeze the leftovers.)

Once cooled, crumble into bowl, add milk for a breakfast-type cereal.

ruricolist• 12 years ago

This recipe, like the original, suffers from a bizarre lack of bacon grease.

delinka2• 12 years ago

And crushed bacon. You people are making me hungry.

anonfunction• 12 years ago

Top it off with some honey butter and it's so delicious:

Half a stick of butter

A few tablespoons of honey

Melt the butter and then place it in the fridge for maybe 5 minutes or until it starts to firm up slightly. Take the now semi-solid butter and add honey and whisk (using a fork works fine) for a minute or two until you get the honey well mixed in. Spread on warm cornbread and enjoy.

delinka2• 12 years ago

This, to me, is cake. Literally. Substitute more cornmeal for the flour. Perfection.

P.S. your "1/4 cooking oil" should be "1/4 cup cooking oil" right?

patronagezero3• 12 years ago

You are correct, edited for clarity.

nkozyra• 12 years ago

Southerners are never averse to sugar.

tfussell• 12 years ago

We are in our cornbread!

jmilloy• 12 years ago

I'm of the impression that proper southern cornbread is the version without sugar (as well as cooked in a preheated cast iron skillet that goes back into the oven), whereas northern cornbread has sugar. (Wikipedia mostly agrees, at least on the sugar front).

This caused me problems when I tried to make cornbread on my own for the first time after moving north for college. It wasn't as good as I remembered from home until I realized I had to take out the sugar.

mindcrime• 12 years ago

In terms of things like "sweet tea" or Pepsi, that's very true. But having grown up in the south, and still living there, I've never known it to be commonplace to make cornbread sweet here. There's also a deep divide among southerners on whether BBQ sauce should be sweet or not.

Personally, even being from eastern NC where vinegary based BBQ rules supreme, I prefer the sweeter style of BBQ. YMMV.

shawn-butler• 12 years ago

Amen, but I prefer high butterfat butter to vegetable oils: http://www.ansonmills.com/recipes/464

A serious argument [0] can be made that sugar crept in due to the switch from stone milling to steel rollers circa 1900 which greatly affected the flavor of corn meal due to the amount of the kernel being lost but also the heat generated.

Kind of a double whammy... the heat robs it of flavor which is made up for by adding sugar and also decreases the nutrient value of the meal by milling out the germ.

[0] http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/08/why-southern-cornbread-sh...

patronagezero3• 12 years ago

Well, you just blew my mind with that last link. I'll have to give that recipe a try as well, I'm pretty sure it'll be worth it. Thanks!

NovaS1X2• 12 years ago

Great read. Thanks for the article.

knieveltech2• 12 years ago

If you haven't already try lard.

tormeh• 12 years ago

Huh. Wouldn't it be possible to achieve the same result with a steel mill if its surface was irregular? Sounds cheaper than stone. Won't correct the unripe corn harvest, though.

serf• 12 years ago

Only crazy people put sugar in cornbread

or anyone that reads the cornmeal box.

Here's a tip that makes the sugar component more worth-while without changing an overall savory dish into something else.

Use that same iron skillet, but preheat the skillet in the oven at 475. Pull it out, reduce the oven to 400, oil the skillet and pour the batter. Bake like normal.

The sugar component makes for a caramelized shell when introduced into a hot skillet quickly that has a nearly non-perceivable sweetness, but adds quite a bit to the texture if serving sliced as a side dish.

NovaS1X2• 12 years ago

You know, I've been looking for something fun to eat all day. Not because I'm hungry but because I like to cook and I've been in a lull lately.

I have this in the oven now and this thread as put some life into my kitchen today. Thank you so much for this post, it's been the highlight of my day.

As a side note: This only strengthens my choice of having well seasoned cast-iron pans in my kitchen. They are truly my best piece of cookware and they're some of the cheapest too.

joeyh• 12 years ago

I loathe sweet cornbread, but 1 tsp honey didn't make it sweet to the taste and may have helped it get a nice crust. As did cooking it for just 10 minutes on very hot coals of course.

I think next time I'll try with much less (or no) wheat flour.

dezgeg• 12 years ago

Another classic funny bug report, this time from Linus Torvalds to Fedora's flash plugin: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=439858

  Description of problem:
  youtube no workee - fedora 9 not usable for wife
  How reproducible:
  I didn't try a lot of videos, but I couldn't find a single one
  that actually worked. And what's the internet without the rick-roll?

geofft• 12 years ago

http://joey.hess.usesthis.com/

"This place is nicely remote, and off the grid, relying on solar power. I only get 50 amp-hours of juice on a sunny day, and often less than 15 amp-hours on a bad day. So the whole house runs on 12 volt DC power to avoid the overhead of an inverter; my laptop is powered through a succession of cheap vehicle power adapters, and my home server runs on 5 volt power provided by a USB adapter.

"When power is low, I often hack in the evenings by lantern light"

icebraining• 12 years ago

Also, https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/notes_for_a_caretaker/

tatterdemalion• 12 years ago

That whole usesthis was a joy to read, but I have this exact dream as well:

I dream of a ARM-based netbook with exceptionally good battery life, an E-ink display, and fully open and non-proprietary hardware

falcolas• 12 years ago

After digging into things like this for awhile, it seems like the hardest part would be getting a big e-ink display. There are dozens of low cost/low power arm based Linux computers out there, but hobby e-ink displays over 3" are hard to find.

kolleykibber• 12 years ago

Fascinating. But, how does he not get postural problems working on a netbook screen most of the day?

ant6n• 12 years ago

9' 1024x600 sounds really painful. I have a Dell mini 1012, and it has a 10' 1366x768 resolution, and it's still fanless.

thrownaway2424• 12 years ago

FWIW, the statement about the superiority of Chromium does not match my experience. I certainly recall reading a page on mobile Chrome (iOS) under poor radio coverage and having the whole page replaced after a few minutes with an error about the page being not available.

Sorgam• 12 years ago

It's sad that after 20 years of the web, it still doesn't work properly. These kinds of bugs should have been solved years ago.

cbd1984• 12 years ago

It's the cost of it working at all, at least in terms of it being as accessible as it is:

Making it feasible for people to create websites quickly enough to be worthwhile entailed allowing the tag soup non-standard HTML we see in practice now, and the confluence of desire and technical limitations made plug-ins inevitable.

A "better-regulated" Internet wouldn't have had the Web at all. Remember that, according to the people using it circa 1988, file transfer and hypertext were both solved problems, with FTP and Gopher respectively already in existence. Unstructured hypertext, something Gopher was not really designed for, wasn't especially desired until some random at CERN released WorldWideWeb and httpd to the world.

jschwartzi• 12 years ago

This is actually a relatively new "feature" of web browsers. When I was a kid, if a page didn't load completely it would just make do with whatever assets it could grab. Images would be replaced with a stand-in icon and some descriptive text.

jeorgun• 12 years ago

iOS Chrome is something like reskinned Safari under the hood, though, isn't it? It could very well be that desktop Chrome acts differently.

rgbrenner• 12 years ago

Right:

Apple’s App Store policies state: “Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.”

This means that web browsers can’t implement their own rendering engines; they must embed a version of Safari’s rendering engine. They can’t offer a faster rendering engine or new web features. In effect, each third-party browser on iOS is a different interface around Safari.

http://www.howtogeek.com/184283/why-third-party-browsers-wil...

peteretep• 12 years ago

Oooh, can we turn this in to general annoyances about browsers?

Frickin' Safari on iOS that won't render a page until whatever God-awful custom webfont the designer has specified has loaded. 1 in 20 blog pages I load in Safari load with invisible text, and it just ... hangs.

idunno246• 12 years ago

Yea, but luckily the reader view doesnt do that, as soon as possible ill switch into that.

undrcvr-lagggal2• 12 years ago

4realz. For me (firefox on slow connections), those kinds of blogs just take seconds to load, then blank out for a few seconds, then the content is displayed again in a different font. Typically I'd be reading half way through the introduction and then the page turns blank. I usually just close the page at that point since those types of blogs don't typically have any useful information.

nkuttler• 12 years ago

Mobile Chrome seems to try to reload the page each time you focus out and in of the browser, change tabs, or whatever. Really terrible behaviour.

psykovsky• 12 years ago

The main reason I use a custom android rom, to have firefox as my main browser and not have chrome as a system app.

Stratoscope2• 12 years ago

While we're sharing cornbread recipes, here's mine.

This is a different kind of cornbread, not highly sweetened, low in fat and high in fiber, but very tasty.

Utensils:

9.5" Pyrex pie pan (a fairly deep one, not one of the really shallow ones)

Two large bowls

Wire whisk

Dry ingredients:

1 cup cornmeal, or half cornmeal and half polenta (a coarser cornmeal)

1 cup oat bran

1 Tbsp baking powder

1/4 to 1/2 tsp salt

Wet ingredients:

1/2 cup plain nonfat yogurt (I use Trader Joe's French Village, or Nancy's plain nonfat - it's the same yogurt under either name)

1/2 cup orange or apple juice

1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce

1 large egg or two small

Other ingredients:

Butter to grease the pie pan

Process:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Generously grease the pie pan with butter.

Mix dry ingredients in a bowl with the wire whisk.

Mix wet ingredients in the other bowl (a large one) with the wire whisk.

Pour dry ingredients into wet and mix together.

Pour the batter into the pie pan.

Bake for 30 minutes.

Serve hot, with maple syrup or good quality (not too sweet) jam or fruit spread.

weinzierl• 12 years ago

Mobile Safari on iOS behaves similarly. Trying to scroll, I sometimes I click on a link accidentally. When network is slow, going back to the original page does a reload and takes ages or even fails.

gaius2• 12 years ago

On the iPad I can have a tab fully loaded, switch to a different tab, switch back and inexplicably it will try to reload the first tab and barf if it can't. So forget loading a page to read later if later happens to be on a plane or train...

Or worse, it is impossible to fill in a form by cutting and pasting between two tabs. Because at some point it will just decide for no particular reason to reload the form and you lose everything.

nezza-_-• 12 years ago

Which iPad are you using? For me it improved a lot after upgrading from the iPad Mini to the retina iPad Mini... I still hate the behaviour and it still occasionally happens.

detaro2• 12 years ago

I think that is because it removed the hidden tab from memory and doesn't keep a local persistent cache.

RexRollman• 12 years ago

I've seen that behavior and it is annoying. I has assumed it was due to memory constraints.

ikawe• 12 years ago

Ha! I knew this had to be Joeyh before reading the article.

keithpeter• 12 years ago

Yup. Mr Hess has a whimsical style which I find amusing.

I won't be able to reproduce this bug until February, and even then it will be Parkin (a form of cake made with oats) rather than Cornbread.

Seriously, if I found myself on dialup right now (or more likely a very slow mobile connection) I'd ssh into the shell account and use links from there at least for initial searching and text based information.

I'm wondering if there is some form of directive in the html of the requested page that forces a page refresh every now and again?

zhte415• 12 years ago

A cornbread recipe without eggs, milk or sugar, very wholesome:

400g cornflour

200g wheat flour

250ml water (add gradually, moisture depends on relative humidity)

Teaspoon of baking powder

Teaspoon of salt

Mix.

Form into balls.

Heat an iron pan, gently. Press balls into desired shape and place on pan.

Cook, covered. If uncovered, turn to roast both sides.

jerf• 12 years ago

Not to distract from the corn bread recipes (which, in all serious, actually led me down some interesting links to some things I intend to have a closer look at later), but what is the mechanism behind the described failure of the browser? Is it when the original page doesn't fully load? Is it a certain type of resource that half-loads? It's happened to me a couple of very inconvenient times (though not quite to that level) and I'd be interested in any possible mitigation strategies.

hintss• 12 years ago

if the net connection dies while page resources (but not the actual html) are still loading, the already-loaded-partial-page is replaced with an error message

andrewliebchen• 12 years ago

If you don't bake your cornbread in a cast iron skillet, you're Doing It Wrong™.

danellis• 12 years ago

Suggestion: turn off "call waiting".

watt• 12 years ago

This indeed is the pathological case of awful pattern of modal notifications stealing focus. Here the "notification" that connection has failed indeed destroys the whole page you have been working on (by replacing the content you care about, with some message about which you could care less).

The browser (or application, or desktop environment) should be smart enough to allow enqueuing such notification and presenting it via some facility that respects users task and only shows the message via some non-focus-stealing approach. Such as growl.

The bug means loss of user information. We as developers should be treating the user's information as sancrosanct. Such as never presenting question "Do you want to save?". Instead, save everything implicitly. Don't steal focus to ask for confirmation: instead offer unobtrusive undo. Allow user to delete when he wishes so. (Like Gmail does.) Never lose user-entered information. Never destroy user's flow. Never destroy user's view (workspace).

jasonlotito• 12 years ago

The danger, of course, is that presenting a half finished page and someone missing the growl message. They continue using the page, but miss out on critical information that would have otherwise informed their current actions.

In this case, presenting an overlay saying the page did not finish loading, and you can continue reading if you want with the caveat that the last part of the recipe, perhaps the most critical part, is not present.

After all, if you don't give that cornbread a minute or two to settle and cool, you'll burn your tongue.

codefisher• 12 years ago

Besides all the jokes - which are funny - this is something I posted a bug about before, when working on slow unreliable networks this can happen. You end up reading half the page, and then it tells you it can be displayed.

knodi123• 12 years ago

I've seen that problem in chrome before with images; I was trying to read a massive flowchart; the part I was interested in was on the top, and I was busy tracing it with my finger and getting what I needed, when the entire image vanished and was replaced with a placeholder because it timed out while downloading.

This is not just a problem with HTML renderers; JPEG renderers do it too.

andybak• 12 years ago

Weird title change by mods. Used to match the page and gave proper context: "page load fail makes it difficult to cook cornbread in the woodstove"

yzzxy2• 12 years ago

I think the title change was in poor taste here. Most people don't really care about this issue for a browser in of itself, but the mailing list dialogue made the link interesting.

Stratoscope2• 12 years ago

And as a practical matter, I believe the title change led directly to downvotes for my cornbread recipe and perhaps the recipes that other people posted last night. Mine was at +4 last night, now down to +2.

I try not to worry much about downvotes, but I do use them as a signal to help me understand what kinds of comments are appreciated or not.

I often read the HN threads before looking at the original article, and I can easily imagine reading these comments after the title change and thinking, "Why are these people talking about cornbread recipes? What does this have to do with page loads or Iceweasel? Downvote!"

In this case, though, "cornbread" was right there in the title when we started sharing our recipes last night, and the original article talks about baking cornbread and links to a recipe. So the recipes weren't entirely irrelevant at the time we posted them - and the initial upvotes seemed to confirm that - but the title change sure makes them look off-topic.

keenerd• 12 years ago

As someone who's writings have been on the front page a few times, I've wondered how I can protest the heavy handed title mods. The best idea so far is to wait for one of my pages to "make it" here and then stealthily change my title to something extremely clickbaity.

Anyone have suggestions for titles? "Read this One Weird Article; HN Mods Hate It!" is my personal favorite.

dang• 12 years ago

I'm not sure what happened there, because that's the HTML doc title. We've changed it back.

Page load fail makes it difficult to cook cornbread in the woodstove

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