FME Idol 2008
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The FME User Conference in 2008 again had an FME Idol contest to discover the ultimate FME user.
In Pictures
The story in pictures....
The second FME Idol took place in the same venue as the first, the Morris Wosk Centre for Dialogue.
The same judges were there...
...albeit with a little less hair than the last time around.
Last year's champions (Jason Birch and Peter Laulund) were joined by newcomers Jeff Konnen and Ulf Mannson (from left to right:Ulf, Jeff, Jason, Peter)
And they're off. The concentration is intense; as is the challenge itself!
And with all the data available via the internet, anyone in the audience could - and did - join in.
The rest of the audience looked on patiently as the contest went on (and on, and on, and on)
Even the contestants themselves began to doze off.
"But I thought it was only going to last 'this' long"!
Is Ulf about to make a breakthrough?
Marketing Director, Jaylene, is praying we can finish before the evening's entertainment starts...
...while doctors prescribe FMEIdol therapy as a cure for insomnia!
But it's always darkest before the dawn...
...and a smile slowly passes across Jeff's face!
A winner! (At last)
Just time for iPods all around...
...before heading out to an evening of sushi and improv comedy.
The Challenges
The 2008 FME Idol contest consisted of FOUR different challenges, each of which had to be tackled in turn. The first contestant to complete the four challenges was the winner.
When solved, the first challenge revealed the location (a URL) of the dataset for the second challenge. The solution to the second challenge revealed the location of the third, and so on.
All four challenges are attached to this page, but also still exist in their original URLs, so you can choose whether to do each challenge on its own or complete them in order as the contestants did.
First Challenge
The files can be found below - but for the purists, the first challenge can be downloaded from:
http://tinyurl.com/3xe9wt
Contestants
The contestants were the 2006 winners (Peter Laulund and Jason Birch) plus two users who had contributed significantly to the FME community in the last two years; Jeff Konnen and Ulf Mansson.
Solutions
If you get stuck on a particular challenge then you can find the Safe-devised solutions below.
Don't think that these are the only solution for each problem. Each challenge can be solved in a number of ways, some of which were not even thought of when creating them. Ideally you would use an FME workspace (or mapping file) rather than taking shortcuts - though there are some very interesting methods you could use to cheat with!
Winner
Congratulations to Jeff Konnen, who won a fluid earth bowl (http://fluid-forms.com/shop/catalog/product_info-products_id-80.html) for coming the closest to completing all four challenges.
Kudos to the conference audience members who also took part, including Brett from Lagen Spatial whose first challenge was to generate an evaluation license to start FME with!
