Hi folks,

This week your challenger was Jen from our Server tech experts. It seemed to be a bit of a tough week, although I deliberately left out any Server questions to give you more of a chance.

Let's see the answers:

1) Safe has subscription pricing models for various industries. Which of these is NOT a real subscription model for FME?

• Local Government Subscription
• Forestry Subscription
• Utilities Subscription
• Education Subscription
• Airports Subscription

The answer is that there is no subscription model for forestry:

... at least, none yet. I suppose you never know.

Incidentally, a subscription model allows you to use as much FME as you like - both Desktop and Server - for the one annual fee. It can make more sense than using individual licenses when you want to get a project underway very quickly, or want to have a better prediction of future costs.

I have to also mention that the Education Subscription is for institutions to use for operations and facilities management. It's not the same thing as using FME for educational purposes, for which the licenses are free through our grant program.

Jen's Answer: Forestry (Correct)

2) What key combination is the shortcut to Generate Workspace on an Apple Mac?

• Combination 1
• Combination 2
• Combination 3
• Combination 4
• Combination 5

So... I can't list the combinations/shortcuts, because this site doesn't seem to like it! Thankfully FME Server is way more tolerant of special characters!

The answer is the shortcut with "N" and the Mac command key in it! Why is it "N" and not "G", you might be asking; especially since Windows uses Ctrl+G. I suspect it's because a Mac uses "G" for a search function by default; so FME supports F and G as shortcuts for search, meaning N must be for Generate (or New) Workspace.

Jen's Answer: G (Incorrect)

3) Which geometry type isn't listed as an option in the Creator transformer?

• Clothoid
• Rectangle Face
• Sphere
• Arc By Center Point
• Box

The Creator transformer is capable of making different geometries, which I usually use for testing workspaces:

I'm not sure I even know what a clothoid is. But one geometry type that it doesn't create is a sphere.

Jen's Answer: Rectangle Face (Incorrect)

4) One of these is NOT an anagram of a transformer name, but which one?

• A call to curry a gnu tail
• Met inert rutabaga
• Next fall term
• Preen a rare tectonic terrorist
• Mark films novel ex cod

I figured this might be a bit hard on non-English speakers, but especially so if you don't know the word "anagram" (I certainly don't know it for any language but English). So apologies if you had trouble.

But I was very impressed that several users used FME (with or without Python) to solve the anagrams and (hopefully) come up with the correct answer. In case you just guessed, here are the solutions:

• A call to curry a gnu tail: AngularityCalculator
• Met inert rutabaga: AttributeManager
• Next fall term: XMLFlattener
• Preen a rare tectonic terrorist: RasterInterpretationCoercer
• Mark films novel ex cod: FME Rocks and I Love XML

The last of those is obviously true, but not a transformer.

Jen's Answer: Mark films novel ex cod (Correct)

5) Why does the RasterBandMinMaxExtractor return a LIST of values?

• Because the output is a summary feature of all input rasters
• Because the output is a min/max value per band and palette
• Because the RasterExpressionEvaluator requires lists as input
• Because list{0}.value is the min and list{1}.value is the max
• Because it has to deal with the RasterSelector band/palette selection

This is the "hard FME" question so I hope this one made you think. Basically the action of this transformer is very straightforward (fetches the min and max values) but it returns a list because it returns a result for each band (and palette). The word "band" in the name is a bit of a clue!

The others are feasible answers, but wrong. For example, the help mentions that "This transformer is unaffected by raster band and palette selection," so that answer was wrong for sure.

Jen's Answer: Because it has to deal with the RasterSelector band/palette selection (Incorrect)

6) Since I started recording all scores in the FME Quiz (about 25 weeks' worth) there have been 756 entries. How many of these were perfect scores?

• 17
• 22
• 38
• 45
• 58

It's becoming increasingly hard to think up "impossible" questions for the quiz (I know! It should be easy, right?) to the point where I almost wrote, "What have I got in my pockets?"!

Anyway, I started recording answers to the quiz around week 5, and since then there have been 58 perfect scores. It seems ironic that there were more perfect scores at first, but the fewer there are, the better your performances against the Safers.

Jen's Answer: 17 (Incorrect - she really doesn't think much of your skills! ;-)

Well. How did you do? Let's see:

• Quiz Week: 31 (June 8/2020)
• Number of Entries: 37
• Best Score: 6
• Worst Score: 0
• Average Score: 3.89
• Perfect Scores: 3
• Easiest Question: 1 (34)
• Hardest Question: 6 (8)

So question 1 the easiest, 6 is the hardest (as expected). The average is lower, but we still got 3 perfect scores: @srg @daniel and @jelle

So how did you do as a group?

• Beat Jen: 31
• Equalled Jen: 4
• Were Beaten by Jen: 2

The overall score is now...

• Users 17 Safers 7

Another victory for the users. Your table is now:

And Jen slots into our table as below...