Where good ideas come from

I am currently rereading this excellent book (WGICF) by Steven Johnson. In Chapter 3, 'The slow hunch', I came across the following passage about 'commonplace' books.

In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations.... John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during his first year at Oxford. Over the next decade he developed and refined an elaborate system for indexing the book’s content. Locke thought his method important enough that he appended it to a printing of his canonical work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke’s approach seems almost comical in its intricacy, but it was a response to a specific set of design constraints: creating a functional index in only two pages that could be expanded as the commonplace book accumulated more quotes and observations.

It occurs to me that this very blog is the modern equivalent of 'commonplacing', and I am devoting no small amount of time to develop[ing] and refin[ing[ an elaborate system for indexing the [blog]’s content.

Recently I was considering MDI programs (e.g. the blog manager) as opposed to non-MDI programs (e.g. the documentation manager), although I don't remember the context. I remember thinking that MDI has the great advantage that one can easily traverse all the 'child windows' that are currently open and perform something upon them. The same idea does not exist in non-MDI programs.

Or does it? Rereading the blogs about DOCU¹ for the first time in years (I wrote them twelve years ago), I find the following statement: As DOCU is not an MDI program, another solution is required; Delphi stores all on screen forms in the 'forms' property of the 'screen' variable. Apparently once I knew this but I've forgotten. So maybe there is an alternative to MDI. So there is value to my 'commonplace' blog - as if I ever doubted it.

Reading a few pages further on in WGICF, I come across Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web. This leads me to the idea of including forward references in the blog manager program; for example, if blog #1787 ("Pedalboard power supply problems") references blog #1725 ("The Dublin murder squad"), then a forward reference would have #1725 referencing #1787. This would be trivial to implement, but I wonder what value this would have. I note that several very interesting developments in the OP's "ERP" program came about from me hacking without regard to the usage of those hacks, and some of them have proved very useful. So I'll throw it in and wait for a future need to occur. 

The tag system provides a way of finding blogs connected to the same topic, but sometimes that topic can be very wide - for example, at the moment there are 188 blogs tagged as 'programming' but those blogs are paired with another 73 distinct tags. Sometimes this is due to having a blog that discusses two completely different topics (for example there are four blogs tagged both 'programming' and 'Randy Newman', one of which is a mistake), and sometimes this is a narrowing of the term, with co-tags like Delphi, office automation and SQL.

Another quote from WGICF about serendipity is appropriate here: But how do you get those particular clusters of neurons to fire at the right time? One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people while they were out on a stroll. (A similar phenomenon occurs with long showers or soaks in a tub; in fact, the original “eureka” moment—Archimedes hitting upon a way of measuring the volume of irregular shapes—occurred in a bathtub.) The shower or stroll removes you from the task-based focus of modern life—paying bills, answering e-mail, helping kids with homework—and deposits you in a more associative state. How many times have I written here that I reached an impasse that was solved by taking the dog for a walk or having a shower? Removing myself from the keyboard helps in finding solutions to programming problems.

I see that I have not created a tag for Steven Johnson - inexplicable (and neither does a full text search find him referenced in this blog, although it found Boris Johnson and Bob Johnson). His book "How we got to now" was the first of his that I ever read and it is amazing in how it traces how a solution to one problem created all kinds of solutions to other problems, where it appears that there is no connection whatsoever between them. 

The book begins with glass - a prehistoric deposit of glass created by nature in Libya intrigued and delighted all those who knew of its existence. But mankind had to wait until it was capable of building furnaces that could heat sand to high temperatures (over 1000°F) before one could make glass. Once there was glass, there were lenses, then telescopes (and that caused a huge scientific and religious revolution when Galileo discovered moons circling Jupiter), mirrors (causing a paradigm shift in art now that people could see what they looked like, and artists began painting self-portraits) then there was photography, then fibreglass, originally for building but later for communication purposes. You get the picture.

Internal links
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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
14	28/09/2005	Something special - Delphi rules!	Programming, Delphi, Randy Newman
289	28/09/2010	Malta log #1	Holiday, Malta
290	28/09/2010	Malta log #2	Holiday, Father, Malta
636	28/09/2013	Reading books	Films, Literature, Beatles
637	28/09/2013	More afterwords (My gap year, part 8)	Gap year, Old recordings
1075	28/09/2017	Train journey to Karmiel	Trains
1176	28/09/2018	Walking the dog leads to epiphanies	DBA
1261	28/09/2019	Understanding the UNLINK command in Priority	Priority tips
1669	28/09/2023	The amateur nutrionist	Health, Nutrition