Winter Scripting Games: Profiles in Perfection
Maureen Farrell
As part of the 2008 Winter Scripting Games the Script Center is profiling competitors who recorded a perfect score in the 2007 Scripting Games. Here, in her own words, is a little something about Maureen Farrell, who received a perfect score in the VBScript Advanced division.
Check out more Profiles in Perfection from the 2007 Scripting Games.
Maureen Farrell
I am dashing this off in a hurry because I am a government employee and I am supposed to be 'managing' rather than 'doing.'
I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude for this VBScript scripting challenge. I had been getting a bit remorseful that my desktop environment seemed limited to the edit tools in Microsoft Office, and I was unable to use PERL or UNIX commands for certain tasks. It was great to be able to put regular expressions and standard computing logic to work in a VBScript script, and to send streaming text to a parser to rebuild a web page with functionality that works in a local Internet Explorer browser. I would not have known this was possible had I not signed up for the challenge (which I happened to notice when looking something up at the Script Center). It was the most interesting and enjoyable thing I did all year.
My tip: Keep it simple. If output is being measured by lines of code, add redundancy for security reasons (e.g., if one function is hacked, trigger another to run) rather than add unnecessary weight. That is my personal opinion. I was amused by the Antiques Script Show, but marvel at sleek code. I am actually a biologist. I think nature selects for compact code.
