Hello FME'ers,

This week I asked my colleagues Nampreet and Jovita if one of them would take the FME quiz. They played rock-paper-scissors and Nampreet lost won and took part.

How did he do? How did you do? Let's see the answers and results below...

1) What are the three tools in FME Workbench for sending workspaces to, or receiving workspaces from, FME Server?

• Upload to FME Server, Reupload to FME Server, Unpublish from FME Server
• Upload to FME Server, Reupload to FME Server, Download from FME Server
• Publish to FME Server, Republish to FME Server, Download from FME Server
• Publish to FME Server, Republish to FME Server, Unpublish from FME Server
• Post to FME Server, Post again to FME Server, Post it one more time to FME Server

It's Publish, Republish, and Download:

Nearly all of you got that one! Well done.

Nampreet's Answer: Publish, Republish, Download (Correct)

2) What technical difficulty did Safer Mark Stoakes encounter while presenting on the Virtual World Tour recently?

• His son tripped over a power cable, disconnecting him from the webinar
• His microphone automatically added an echo effect
• His neighbour's cat lay on the keyboard and refused to move
• His webcam showed him upside-down
• GotoWebinar automatically added Polish subtitles as he spoke

Most of you went for the power cable or microphone issue, but most of you were wrong:

He only briefly appeared with his webcam on, so if you didn't get there early you would have missed his upside-downness. He had to correct it by turning his computer over, while he wasn't presenting!

He didn't have someone trip over his power cable, not like this poor person!

Nampreet's Answer: His microphone added an echo effect (Incorrect)

3) A feature in FME can be made up of multiple geometries. What do we call attributes attached to a geometry?

• Traits
• Lists
• Tags
• Appearances
• Measures

So, Nampreet put his low score down to not reading the questions correctly, and this was probably one of those. The answer is that an attribute attached to a geometry is called a Trait. They're fairly rare outside of 3D or hierarchical geometries, but we do have various trait-related transformers, including the GeometryPropertySetter:

I'd say more than half of you got this right, with the most common wrong answers being Lists (sorry, a list is attached to a feature and is an attribute with multiple values) and Measures (sorry again, a measure is attached to a specific vertex on a geometry, not the overall geometry).

Nampreet's Answer: Measures (Incorrect)

4) The T-Shirt pictured above is from a long-ago FME World Tour. How long ago?

• 2011
• 2012
• 2014
• 2015
• 2017

The answer is 2014.

Many of you got this correct, and some of you even claim to have the shirt! I thought a telling clue was that Vancouver is missing from the list of events. Why would we miss out Vancouver itself? Only because there was a user conference imminent! So that would have narrowed it down somewhat.

I was asked how many t-shirts were issued for which years. I don't know what the full set would look like. Only a couple of mine have a list of cities, some have a logo mentioning the world tour, and some have a logo that could have been outside of the tour. Still, here they are...

I also have one of Lizard Island, that I think was from the 2014 user conference.

Anyway, I don't know if it's worth crowdsourcing a database of FME t-shirts from over the years, but feel free to post pictures of yours' below.

Nampreet's Answer: 2012 (Incorrect)

5) What does an old StatisticsCalculator upgraded to FME2020 give you that a brand-new StatisticsCalculator would not?

• The ability to calculate Standard Deviation Values
• Parallel Processing parameters
• An Attribute Name Preservation Map panel
• A Cumulative Results output port
• A Calculate Statistics as Strings mode

This was another question that I think you needed to read carefully (so I apologize to non-English speakers). I didn't ask what is the difference between the old and new transformers. I asked what is different about an old transformer that is upgraded.

The difference is an Attribute Name Preservation Map panel:

See, the new StatisticsCalculator doesn't let you rename attributes the same way the old one did. You have to do that with a separate transformer. But in order that an upgraded transformer wouldn't lose the old-style renaming, we added this panel - only to upgraded transformers - to keep the mapping.

As for the others, both can calculate SD values; neither have parallel processing; the cumulative port is now optional in 2020, but still exists; and the new transformer gives you the String calculation mode, not an updated old transformer.

Nampreet's Answer: A Cumulative Results Output Port (Incorrect)

6) We had many questions in the in the recent Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) session that we didn't have time to answer. Which of these was NOT asked by our users?

• Who has the nicest office and why?
• If you could be a animal, what would it be?
• [Do you call your evening meal] "Dinner" or "Supper"?
• What is your least-favourite Star Trek character?
• How did they put men on the moon without FME?

We had a bunch of questions left over from the ask-me-anything session. All of the above were in that list except, "what is your least-favourite Star Trek character?"

I guess we didn't really want to know that. While we might never know Don or Dale's answers to the other questions, I'll give you my answers (and feel free to post yours below)

• I have the nicest office; because I've never been to the new Safe HQ since it opened and so can give no other answer!
• I think I'd like to be an otter.
• As a boy I would have said neither! I would have said "tea". My meals were Breakfast/Dinner/Tea, with Supper a snack before bedtime. Nowadays I've gone all posh and use Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner.
• Wesley Crusher. Who else?
• Easy! By writing this much code:

Which is pretty much what you do today when you don't have access to our favourite data integration tool!

Nampreet's Answer: "Dinner" or "Supper"? (Incorrect)

Let's see the general quiz info and scores:

• Quiz Week: 25 (Apr 20/2020)
• Number of Entries: 24
• Best Score: 5
• Worst Score: 1
• Average Score: 2.88
• Perfect Scores: 0
• Easiest Question: 1 (23)
• Hardest Question: 2 (3)

A low average score, an open goal waiting for Nampreet... and he missed :-(

• Beat Nampreet: 21
• Equalled Nampreet: 3
• Were Beaten by Nampreet: 0

Zero wins for the Safer. That's a first.

The overall score is now...

• Users 12 Safers 6

Now I'm starting to panic!

Here's your user league table:

Here's the Safer one:

And the effect it had on the Experts team's standing:

Ouch!