Hi FME'ers,

Well, here are the quiz answers for this week. I hope you found it fun to go up against Dale, and try to prove the theory of Wisdom of the Crowd. I did make the questions a little harder, to give you a chance, and judging by the results, you took that opportunity.

But first, the answers...

1) So here's an easy one for you. What is the shortcut to run a workspace?

• F3
• F5
• F5.6
• F11
• F#

OK, let's say really easy. The only difficultly might be that you've used F5 so much you've worn the symbol off your keyboard. It also has a bunch of variations:

F6 also runs a workspace in various combinations, but F5 is the main one; especially since (in 2019 or newer) it now only runs uncached portions. Shift+F5 reruns the entire workspace.

Incidentally, F3 is a shortcut key to the workspace search dialog (who knew?) and F11 is the shortcut to expand the canvas to the whole screen. Try F11. I find it useful quite often.

Besides that, F5.6 is a photography F-stop and not a shortcut key (not even for raster imagery) and F# is both a programming language and a guitar chord that is particularly difficult to form. If FME were a chord it would something much easier, like G or Em.

Dale's Answer: F5 (Correct)

2) Safe's new office covers a large enough area to be represented by a number of What3Words addresses. Which of these (all real addresses) points to Safe's office?

• mighty.cold.parsnips
• flighty.spoon.fact
• dicey.unfunded.nametags
• droopy.lost.trifle
• best.data.integrator

You probably looked this up, if you wanted to get the correct answer. I suggested Dale didn't do that, to give you an advantage. The answer is dicey.unfunded.nametags.

It's a real shame that best.data.integrator didn't match. Perhaps the best FME one for our address is envisage.editing.bench. Neither is best.technical.evangelist near me either. Oh well.

Dale's Answer: mighty.cold.parsnips (Incorrect)

3) Which three tools does FME Server support for its internal database system?

• PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle
• DB2, Hadoop, MySQL
• Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL
• Hadoop, DB2, SQL Server
• CSV, Access, DBF

I thought I'd throw in a Server question, to see if Dale would know this. But did you?

Unsurprisingly, our Server technology is not built around CSV, Access, and DBF! It's PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Oracle that are permitted databases for FME Server internals. I believe that PostgreSQL is the default installation, but you can easily install and switch to one of the other two choices.

Dale's Answer: PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle (Correct)

4) The FME Training course used to have a series of characters mentioned throughout the manual. Which of these people was not part of our training?

• Police Chief Webb-Mapp
• Mr Statistics-Calculator, Accountant
• Captain Clipper, Airline Pilot
• Chad Pugh-Litzer, Journalist
• Sister Intuitive, of the Order of the Perpetual Translation

So we used to have various characters dispensing information, like this:

I wondered if Dale reads our training materials, and figured you trainers and trainees out there might have a head start on this one, even if you recognized just one or two names.

Which of the above list was not part of our training? It was Captain Clipper. Instead our airline pilot was First-Officer Transformer. You may even recall that Police Chief Webb-Mapp was the wife of Firefighter Mapp. Sadly (perhaps not) we've replaced them all with the FME Lizard. I really miss Sister Intuitive!

Dale's Answer: Chad Pugh-Litzer (Incorrect)

5) Which of these is not a valid type of FME User Parameter:

• Integer
• Text
• Color Picker
• Date
• Password

A user parameter - as you'll know - is a way for a workspace author to prompt the user for a value at run-time. There are lots of different parameter types, which is useful because it gives the user a custom dialog for that type and FME can also parse the input to an extent.

The correct answer here is Integer. Sure, there is a type Number, which you can constrain to be an integer; but there is no specific type called Integer.

I don't want to name and shame anyone who got this wrong, I'll just say...

Dale's Answer: Color Picker (Incorrect)

6) I (Mark) used to bring an assistance dog in training to work. What was her name?

• Shamrock
• Bluebell
• Clover
• Buttercup
• PointOnRasterValueExtractor

So obviously this is the impossible question, because who could possibly know this? Well apparently some folk found the answer online (I'm shocked, but hey, the internet remembers everything I suppose). The dog in question is Clover:

That's her attending a Canucks hockey game, by the way! She was a bit too excitable to be an assistance dog and the last I heard, she was working in airport security.

Because she was an assistance dog, I didn't get naming rights, otherwise PointOnRasterValueExtractor might have been considered. OK, probably not. Clipper is just about the only transformer you could use as a dog's name.

Dale's Answer: Clover (Correct)

So, if you've been keeping count, Dale scored 3/6. Let's see how our users did...

Here's the general info:

• Quiz Week: 8 (Dec 2/2019)
• Number of Entries: 24
• Best Score: 6
• Worst Score: 1
• Average Score: 3.96
• Easiest Question: 1 (22)
• Hardest Question: 4 (9)

Once again the "impossible" question is not the hardest. Well there you go. So of the 23 entries, how many beat Dale?

• Beat Dale: 14
• Equalled Dale: 6
• Were Beaten by Dale: 3

There were even five perfect 6/6 scores! Here's the full list of fame/shame:

note: someone mentioned the datetime reported in the quiz was wrong, but the datetime stamps look correct, so I'm baffled by that one.

So overall I think it's safe to say that the score is Users 1, Safers 0. Well done everyone.

I will say not to brag too much though because a) I know who got Q1 wrong! and b) If @daleatsafe had got Q5 right, he would have narrowly won!