About The Scripting Guys

The Scripting Guys columns are written by Dean Tsaltas, Greg Stemp, and Peter Costantini, and edited by Jean Ross.

Dean Tsaltas is a Nova Scotian living in Redmond. He has become fluent in American and even chuckles at the accent of his friends and family back in the Maritimes. He got his start in computing at a tender age when his grandma and parents chipped in and bought him his beloved C-64 and a subscription to Compute!'s Gazette. He has been at Microsoft for a few years now and has a message for friends and family back home and in Vancouver: "No, I have not met Bill!"

Greg Stemp has long been acknowledged as one of the country's foremost authorities on scripting, and has been widely acclaimed as a world-class... huh? Well, how come they let football coaches make up stuff on their resumes? Really? He got fired? Oh, all right. Greg Stemp works at... Oh, come on now, can't I even say that? Fine. Greg Stemp gets paid by Microsoft to write about scripting.

Peter Costantini is a native of the Bronx. After a few lost years studying waste management with the Soprano family in New Jersey, he tried a career in show business, but was consistently mistaken for Gummo Marx. In the waning years of the second Nixon Administration, he settled in Seattle, and has the moss between his toes to prove it. He cut his scripting teeth on CP/M and DOS 1.0 and has made sporadic progress since then. His two cats don't care much about scripting, but enjoy sitting on the monitor mocking him as he struggles with rewrites and debugging. His latest project is an enhancement to Ethan Wilansky's trash-removal / dish-washing script (see below): it's a function that takes anchovies, black olives, and capers as parameters and returns pasta puttanesca.

Jean Ross started her professional career as a software developer. Having experienced some success at that job, she decided to go where the money and the glory really are—editing. Okay, so no one really ever has figured out that move, but nonetheless she's been editing technical material for several years and seems to enjoy it.

Doctor Scripto got his start singing Do Loop music a cappella on street corners around Silicon Valley and Route 128 during the flush days of the Internet Bubble of the 90s.  When the bubble burst, the venture capitalists stopped dropping IPO shares in his tin can, so he made his way up to Redmond, where he auditioned for Microsoft Bob, but didn't get a callback.  The Scripting Guys met him when he was down on his luck, and recognized a diamond in the rough.  We hired him, and now he's on a T-shirt.  Life can't get much sweeter than that for a humble software agent.

Scripting Guys Emeriti

These fellows have graduated from The Scripting Guys, but you'll still see their names on our previous works.

Bob Wells wanders around aimlessly espousing the virtues of scripting to anyone who will listen. Rumor has it, Bob's two dachshunds know more about scripting than most humans.

Ethan Wilansky spends a lot of his work time writing and consulting. He's crazy about scripting, Yoga, gardening, and his family (not necessarily in that order). He is currently working on a way to create script that will take out the trash and wash the dinner dishes.

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