Hi folks,
This week your challenger was Dennis from our Technical Publications team. Let's see if you could keep up your winning streak against the Safers:
Answers1) Safe Software recently gained which accreditation?
- ISO 3103 (Preparation of Tea)
- ISO 18012 (IT Guidelines for Product Interoperability)
- ISO 21931 (Sustainability in Building Construction)
- ISO 27001 (Information Security Management)
- ISO 30190 (Digitally Recorded Media for Information Interchange)
We are now certified for information security, which means all your data is safe with Safe!
We aren't certified for making tea; at least not for official tasting purposes. The product interoperability standard is more for home appliances than spatial data and - although we are very environmentally conscious - we don't hold building construction sustainability qualifications (though the builders who constructed our new office may well have done). Finally, Digitally Recorded Media refers to BlueRay disks!
2) How did Safe co-founder Dale Lutz once describe point clouds?
- Badly behaved rasters
- Multi-point geometries on speed
- 3D raster slices
- Aggregates of zero-length lines
- Nothing that the typical FME user should know about
Dale has often said that point clouds are nothing but badly behaved rasters. I'm not sure how he will describe the voxel geometry that we are currently implementing.
3) There are four different options for setting the view mode in the FME Data Inspector. Which of these is NOT a valid option?
- Set the view window to 2D graphics
- Set the view window to 3D graphics
- Set the view window to show the table view contents
- Set the view window to slideshow mode
- Set the view window to rendered mode
The option we don't have is for a "rendered mode", which just happens anyway in 3D.
Some folks might not be too familiar with Slideshow mode. That's a way to view one feature at a time, and is the best way to view raster features that fall on top of each other.
4) The logo (icon) for FME Workbench includes what two tools ("borne saltirewise," as they would say in Heraldry)?
- A hammer and a wrench (spanner)
- A hammer and a saw
- A screwdriver and a wrench (spanner)
- A saw and a screwdriver
- A Japanese chamfer plane and crosscut tenon saw
It's amazing how many folks don't really look at the icon enough to remember what it contains (even folks at Safe)! To refresh your memory, it looks like this:
That is definitely a screwdriver and a spanner (or wrench). I actually looked it up to see what this crossed-objects layout is called in heraldry, and it is called "saltirewise", coming from "saltire", which means a cross.
I also found out that these would be called "charges". The screwdriver charge is "bend dexter" meaning it is angled from the top-right (if you were stood behind it, holding it as a shield) and the spanner charge is "bend sinister" meaning it is angled from the top left.
Apparently (and I mean no offence to left-handed folk here) the bend dexter is more honourable than the bend sinister, and so the bend dexter charge (the screwdriver) is more important and so should be uppermost (above the spanner), which it is.
So I doubt our graphic designer looked up heraldry before creating the logo, but they still got the layout correct, with the screwdriver uppermost!
5) How do you set a Group-By on the Counter transformer?
- Set the Group-By parameter to an attribute value
- Set the Counter Name parameter to an attribute value
- Set the Count Scope parameter to Local
- Use the ModuloCounter transformer instead
- Use the StatisticsCalculator transformer instead
There is no group-by parameter, so you set the counter name parameter to an attribute value. Here the parks will be numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc for every neighbourhood, because Counter Name is set to NeighborhoodName:
So this was partly meant to be a question and partly a test to see how many users knew this. The majority did, which is good. Still, I think it's best if we create a proper group-by, and that is on our list of things to do.
6) 1526 is the answer. What is the question?
- How many users will get a special badge on the new community to recognize their contributions to this one?
- What is the target number of registrations for the upcoming XML-athon webinar?
- How many days will have elapsed from the 2017 User Conference to the 2021 User Conference?
- What build number of FME introduced the Shapefile format?
- What is the total number of years worked at Safe by its current set of employees?
If you weren't aware, we're setting up a new FME Community on a different system. Because badges will be lost in the transfer, we're creating a number of new badges to ensure your contributions are still recognized.
So 1,526 users on this site have earned a "retro" badge on the upcoming new site, to signify that they took part in this community. Here's a sneak peek of what these badges look like:
Some users will even earn multiple badges. There will be other new badges too, and changes to recognition and such like, plus - of course - the site will be much better in other ways.
I can't say too much, but there is a webinar planned for the near future to launch the new site and explain the differences.
As to the other answers... to be honest, I just made them up. But I didn't check them specifically, so it could be that there really are 1,526 days between the last user conference and the next, or that Shapefile was introduced in build 1,526. The number of days, particularly, is close enough to be plausible!
So if you have proof that another answer is also true, do let me know!
ScoresWell. How did you do? Let's see:
- Quiz Week: 33 (June 29/2020)
- Number of Entries: 33
- Best Score: 6
- Worst Score: 1
- Average Score: 3.82
- Perfect Scores: 1
- Easiest Question: 1 (26)
- Hardest Question: 6 (4)
Congratulations to @joyce for getting a 100% correct score, the only user to do so. I do find it interesting how question 6 is not just impossible, but more than impossible Only 11% got it correct, whereas on a random basis it should be 20%, so I must be making my questions very devious!
Anyway, how did you do as a group?
- Beat Dennis: 21
- Equalled Dennis: 7
- Were Beaten by Dennis: 5
The overall score is now...
- Users 19 Safers 7
Another victory for the users (sigh).
Although Dennis did rather well:
See you next Monday!
