Relocate the Chrome address bar? Get a life!

According to an aggrieved poster on Slashdot, users are overwhelmingly asking Google to move the Chrome tab collection underneath the address / URL edit box. As far as I am concerned, all that that proves is that those users are stupid, and Google is right to ignore them. The URL is a property of the page that the user is on, and as such, the control that surfaces it should be inside the page. If you consider that tabs are a part of the page metaphor, then what is below the tab is part of the page, while what is above the tab is not.

All these supposed users are doing then, is asking Google to move away from a placement that makes sense in the context of the page metaphor to one that doesn't. Instead of being part of the page, the address bar would become some kind of shared area updated whenever the user changes tabs. I don't see that as an improvement.

[And note that since we are talking about consistency with a metaphor, it's actually irrelevant whether the tab bar is in fact implemented as a shared resource or not, i.e. whether there is only one of them or one per tab.]

Cornbread Surprise

The surprise being that it came out rather well!

I had a big bag of coarse-ground cornmeal and some plain flour hanging around, so during the week I made an effort to buy some baking powder and some bicarbonate of soda (which I *think* is the same as what Americans call baking soda), as well as some eggs and some yoghurt.

I took 1.5 cups cornmeal, 1 cup plain flour, 2 tablespoons of sugar, 3 teaspoons baking powder, half a teaspoon bicarb and half a teaspoon of salt, and mixed all the dry ingredients together in a bowl.

I took a cup of plain yoghurt and three eggs and mixed them in a measuring bowl. Decided that that wasn't going to be enough liquid to wet all the dry ingredients, so added a big splash of milk, say half a cup. The original recipe had called for two tablespoonsful of honey (yes, this seems to have been a very *northern* US recipe) but I didn't have any, so I added a few drops of vanilla essence for the taste and smell, and hoped for the best on the moistness side.

Then baked at 200 degrees centigrade for 30 minutes. One is supposed to use a cast iron skillet, but I made do with a ceramic oven dish, which would have taken about twice as much ingredients as I actually had. As a result, the bread was fairly thin in the dish, say just over an inch in depth.

I was prepared for the ceramic dish not to be conductive enough of the heat, but in fact it ended up baked perfectly (it's an old fan-oven). The bread rose to about two inches in depth, and moved in a remarkably spongy/foamy way when cutting. Despite this however, it was somewhat dry — a single cup of yoghurt was about two thirds of the largish pot that I had bought, perhaps I should have used it all. Three eggs had seemed like rather a lot to me, since most of the recipes I'd seen had called for two, and some for only one, and indeed, the result was rather eggy/cakey-tasting; despite this however, and perhaps because of the dryness, it was prone to breaking up when handled. The vanilla made it smell and taste excellent.

All in all a qualified success: it will definitely all get eaten, and it should keep for three days or so in the fridge. Next time I'll try with more yoghurt and only two eggs. I think that should taste better and be more moist, but whether it will make the crumbliness better or worse is an open question.

I'm also leaning to want to experiment making potato bread like this, by including mashed-potato powder in the mix. But should it be the flour or the cornmeal that I replace? I'll probably try both. Potato bread, being naturally savoury rather than sweet, will probably also require a more southern-US oriented approach: no sugar, buttermilk rather than yoghurt, maybe only a single egg. On the other hand, I could add fried-onions, and would wet the baking tin with bacon fat rather than butter :)