

Page load fail makes it difficult to cook cornbread in the woodstove - JoshTriplett
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=773619

======
geofft
[http://joey.hess.usesthis.com/](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"

~~~
tatterdemalion
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
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.

~~~
saidajigumi
Are there even e-ink displays with characteristics suitable for
hacker/developer use? Their application has been so greatly limited to
e-readers that I'm unclear how well current displays would function in a
general-purpose system.

Likewise, the impression I've gotten is that that e-ink has been kind of stuck
behind the dominance of LCD (and OLED to a lesser extent), both in perceived
desirability and in resources being put into R&D.

~~~
michaelmachine
Pixel Qi had some pretty interesting products being developed including
reflective LCD displays. I am not sure how readable they are in low light
conditions, but I always thought it would be cool to have one of these for
programming.

~~~
HackinOut
Pixel Qis are not e-ink but still amazing. As you said they are reflective
LCD, and can also be backlit, thus readable in low light just like a regular
LCD. Their market is also small devices, so the size problem is still there
(Last time I checked I think there max size was 10.1 inches)

------
patronagezero
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.

~~~
shawn-butler
Amen, but I prefer high butterfat butter to vegetable oils:
[http://www.ansonmills.com/recipes/464](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...](http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/08/why-southern-cornbread-shouldnt-
have-sugar.html)

~~~
knieveltech
If you haven't already try lard.

~~~
mapt
But understand that typically, American grocery store lard (the sort that
comes in shelf-stable buckets) uses partially hydrogenated oils containing
trans fats; After destroying the lard industry in a slanderous PR war early
last century ("It's digestible!"), eventually the vegetable shortening /
margarine industry (Crisco et al) decided they needed something to sell to
very poor people and people following an insistent recipe, so they applied
their hydrogenation tech to porkfat feedstocks, creating a product that did
not need to be refrigerated.

According to current nutritional doctrine, you should not buy unrefrigerated
pork fat products because of trans fats, even if pork fat itself is no longer
vilified.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Lard renders it non-vegetarian, which can be a significant change.

~~~
knieveltech
And the eggs don't?

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
No, eggs make it non-vegan.

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

------
watt
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
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.

------
jerf
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
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

------
Stratoscope
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
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.

~~~
gaius
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-_-
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.

~~~
gaius
The Air (1)?

------
zhte415
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.

------
knodi123
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.

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

~~~
keithpeter
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?

------
thrownaway2424
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
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.

~~~
jschwartzi
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.

~~~
undrcvr-lagggal
4realz are you serious? What is the actual downside of that? As a kid, it made
perfect sense to me, and I often would right click the image and press reload
or just refresh the whole page. Now whenever images don't load (which is often
these days, since cloudfare blocks tor 90% of the time until you load the
image in a separate window and fill out their captcha, and even without tor,
wireless networks tend to be extremely unreliable), it's not easy to tell
whether the page is broken, since it just collapses the spaces where the
images would have been.

Further, if you directly view an image and it breaks half way, the browser
will hide it and say it's corrupt (and have no "show anyway" button), unless
the size wasn't provided, then the browser just thinks it's valid, despite
that it could parse the JPEG file and find out that lines of pixels are
missing. Calling either of these cases a feature seems very biased.

We aren't even talking about one of the worse problems, which is when a page
fails to load, the browser doesn't try to reload it - you have to come back
and press reload yourself. I've wasted literally hundreds of hours doing this.

~~~
userbinator
Apparently there are people who think it's "aesthetically unpleasing", which
doesn't make much sense to me either:
[http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=63343&star...](http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=63343&start=0)

There's also this related bug which contains over a decade of discussion:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41924](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41924)

I agree that it makes more sense to give the indication "here is an image but
it couldn't be displayed" than to have them disappear completely.

------
codefisher
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.

------
danellis
Suggestion: turn off "call waiting".

------
andybak
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"

~~~
yzzxy
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.

~~~
Stratoscope
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.

~~~
yzzxy
I actually meant to mention this in my original post but forgot: the first
comment I saw when I opened this last night was your recipe. I thought that
was a good indicator of where the discussion was going before the title change
altered the tone.

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

