What's the sign of getting old?

My wife sent me the attached picture which is very apt for me at the moment. I won't trouble your knowledge of Hebrew, so I'll give the translation.

What's the sign of getting old?

• You go to see a play - you fall asleep
• You read the newspaper - you fall asleep
• You watch television - you fall asleep
• When you finally get to bed in order to sleep ... you can't fall asleep.

Since retirement (all of two months), I've been having problems falling asleep  at night. At first, this wasn't too much of a problem as I was swimming almost every day, and swimming relatively long distances, so I was quite tired on those days. But since coming back from Poros (we got home at 4 am) which was followed immediately by Yom Kippur (nothing much to do except rest), I have been having sleep problems. Most evenings I can't fall asleep easily so I've been reaching for the tablets that I bought in Rapallo last year - herbal mixtures for relaxation.

Last week I went to see my GP who prescribed melatonin (my request) and sleeping pills that I cut into four. So far the melatonin hasn't helped so I've been reaching for those sleeping pills; even with the reduced dose, this isn't something that I want to do frequently. But definitely my sleeping patterns are not good: I woke up at 5 am yesterday morning - yes, Saturday morning when most people allow themselves a lie-in. I know that melatonin helps with jet lag but the linked article says research suggests that melatonin might slightly reduce the time it takes to fall asleep [emphasis mine] No wonder my GP wasn't too happy to prescribe the melatonin: this was at my request. I think I'll go back to the herbal mixture until those pills run out.

Apparently the picture was posted on a kibbutz mailing list, and many people said that it described their situation well.

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
207	11/10/2009	This tickled my fancy	Dog
638	11/10/2013	More books	Literature, Tom Clancy
1081	11/10/2017	Research questions	DBA
1346	11/10/2020	Continuing the story of porting an application to Windows 10/Delphi 10.2	Programming, ClientDataSet
1535	11/10/2022	Another DBA update	DBA
1675	11/10/2023	Communal grief (2)	Israel, Obituary, Kibbutz
2016	11/10/2025	Renewing the t-shirt inventory	Personal

Handling links in the Blog Manager Program

Maybe reading the series of blogs about Prolog from last year gave me a sense of nostalgia, programming on Friday afternoons with CoPilot. This caused me to wonder if I could change the target of the links contained within the blogs: at the moment, clicking on a link will cause the chosen blog to be displayed by Internet Explorer, which is somewhat out of date. How could I get the blogs to be displayed in Chrome (or whatever the default browser is)?

CoPilot explained that IE is opened because the TWebBrowser component that I am using in the BPM is an abstraction of part of IE, so of course any link is going to be opened with this program. To change this, I would need to write a message handler that intercepts the link and invokes a different program. True to form with CoPilot, I then spent at least an hour trying to get the interceptor to work with a click on a link with no success. It turned out that CoPilot had given me the wrong message handler, but even when that was corrected, the interceptor still didn't work.

Eventually some rather arcane code was required to get the links to display in Chrome. At some stage in the process, I also realised that it would be good if links to other blog entries would be displayed within the BPM instead of invoking Chrome. This too took some time to make it work correctly; I originally thought that I could use the links on the statusbar¹, but when I actually came to do this, I could see that the address and the statusbar text were not the same. I realised that a simple query would give me the data that I required, and a bit later I realised that I don't need the statusbar nor the code that loads it and catches clicks. So one part of the unit became more complicated and one part became simpler.

I'm showing the interceptor code as I don't know how much of the browser internals are documented.

procedure TShowBlogContent.webNewWindow2(Sender: TObject;
  var ppDisp: IDispatch; var Cancel: WordBool);

var
 linkedblog: integer;
 Doc: IHTMLDocument2;
 Elem: IHTMLElement;
 URL, linkedname: string;

begin
  Cancel:= True;  // stop IE from opening a new window
  Doc:= web.Document as IHTMLDocument2;
  Elem:= Doc.activeElement;

  if Assigned(Elem) then
    URL:= Elem.getAttribute('href', 0);

  if URL <> '' then
   begin
    if pos ('https://nbnewman.blogspot.com', url) = 1 then
     begin
      qLinkedBlog.params[0].asinteger:= blog;
      qLinkedBlog.params[1].asstring:= url;
      qLinkedBlog.open;
      linkedblog:= qLinkedBlog.fields[0].asinteger;
      linkedname:= qLinkedBlog.fields[1].asstring;
      flag:= not qLinkedBlog.isempty;
      qLinkedBlog.close;
      if flag then
       begin
        TShowBlogContent.create (true, linkedblog, linkedname);
        exit
       end;
     end;
    ShellExecute(0, 'open', PChar(URL), nil, nil, SW_SHOWNORMAL);end;
   end;
end;

I've discovered a little bug with the above code - some of the addresses start with https and some with http, without the 's'. The latter kind of link doesn't work, so I'll have to change the expression pos ('https://nbnewman.blogspot.com', url) to pos ('nbnewman.blogspot.com', url). 

Another caveat/bug is that the link has to include 'target="_blank"' for the NewWindow2 event to fire. New blogs have this in their links, old blogs don't. It's easier to add this tag to the blog sources than to try and capture clicks using a different method.

Internal links
[1] 1810

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
413	10/10/2011	Watching the weight / 2	Diet, Acupuncture
764	10/10/2014	Continuing to watch the weight	TV series, Health, Walking
981	10/10/2016	Pain whilst walking	Walking
1080	10/10/2017	Hersonissos	Holiday, Greece
1263	10/10/2019	Cosmology	Personal, Gateway, Non-fiction books
1345	10/10/2020	Simple baked salmon	Cooking
2015	10/10/2025	How to define the 'sister' relationship/predicate in Prolog?	Programming, Prolog, CoPilot