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74 lines
5.2 KiB
Plaintext
74 lines
5.2 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 4208
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Title: HPR4208: 01 Plain Text Programs
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4208/hpr4208.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-25 21:23:22
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---
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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4200 and 8 for Wednesday the 18th of September 2024.
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Today's show is entitled One Plane Text Programs.
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It is part of the series programming 101.
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It is the first show by new host Harry Larry and is about six minutes long.
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It carries a clean flag.
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The summary is, playing text programs, what they are, what they do, why they're good,
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and why they're not for everything.
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Welcome to the Plane Text Programs podcast on Hacker Public Radio.
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I'm your host Harry Larry and my motto is K-I-S-S, stupid.
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Episode 1, Plane Text Programs.
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Hi, I'm here to talk about Plane Text Programs, what they are, what they do, why they're good,
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and why they're not for everything.
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Right up front, I'm requesting feedback on what I have to say.
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I'm on Macedon and I'll start a thread for each podcast,
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or you can reach me by email.
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My Macedon address is at Harry Larry at gamerplus.org.
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My profile is gamerplus.org forward slash at Harry Larry.
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And my email is HarryLarry at deltabookie.com.
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I want to mention that my name Harry Larry, my stage name, is spelled H-A-I-R-Y-L-A-R-Y.
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Take a look at one of my pictures to figure this out.
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Also, you can network with Harry Larry at deltabookie.net.
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In the future, I plan on doing podcasts on specific Plane Text Programs,
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some that I wrote, and some that were written by others.
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Any program that I will discuss will be licensed with a free culture license.
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The first thing I want to emphasize about Plane Text Programs is that there's no database
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like SQL or LLM. All text data is written in Plane Text files and stored on a file system.
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Now, I love databases. Before I retired, I was a database programmer.
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And as a database programmer, I learned a lot about the difficulties
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of maintaining programs that rely on databases. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do with a
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database that's just not reasonable to try with Plane Text. Now that I'm retired, I don't really
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want to work that hard anymore. I want programming to be easy and fun. Plane Text does not mean there
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can't be images or other media. Image files like .jpeg or .png can be stored in the file system
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just like text files. No worries. A big advantage of Plane Text Programs is portability.
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To back up a working program, you copy the directory tree that holds the program's files.
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To install or restore a Plane Text program, copy the tree onto a system or a server.
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I usually work on Linux using the PHP programming language. This is, of course, my preference.
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Any language running on any file system can be used to write Plane Text Programs.
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My minimum install will usually have a configuration file, at least one program file,
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and a set of text files. Some of the Plane Text Programs I use all the time that I wrote are,
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for websites, dirt simple photo gallery, Plane Text Blog, not actually Plane Text Blog,
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and network with Harry Larry. I also have two internet radio programs,
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mixed remix, Creative Commons Jazz, and KGPL. And I have a utility I use called Backup the Web
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Server. I also use Plane Text Programs that other programmers wrote. Music folder player,
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free PHP file directory script, and simple image browser. Links to these programs are in the script.
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So these are mostly websites or web applications, but Plane Text Programs do not have to be outward
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facing. They can just be an easy program that you write to automate a task that you have to
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do periodically, like my Backup the Web Server program that I wrote in bash. I write my Plane Text
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Programs websites so that updates and additions are made with FTP. FTP is a well-established
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secure way to transfer files from your development system to your web server. Another good option,
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particularly for static websites that are generated on the development system, and then mirrored
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up to the server is our sync. I believe that simplicity is the key. I have written complicated
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Plane Text Programs, including the social network writing game collab, but I think a simple page
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or few pages design fits the Plane Text paradigm better. Well, I'm going to call this a wrap for
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now. I plan on covering specific Plane Text Programs in future podcasts, and I may occasionally
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step back and look at the big picture or discuss ideas and specifications for future projects.
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Thanks for listening. I appreciate all your comments. You can find the Plane Text script
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with the link to the comment thread and all other links at home.gamerplus.org. I'm not actually
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Plane Text blog.
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You have been listening to the Plane Text Programs podcast on Hacker Public Radio.
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Go to home.gamerplus.org for scripts and links, and go to deltabookie.net to network with
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Harry Larry. Thanks for listening.
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You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does work.
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Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording
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podcast, you click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is. Hosting for HBR has
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been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the internet archive, and our sync.net. On the
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Sadois status, today's show is released on their creative comments, attribution, 4.0 international
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