#gammatech

Bruce Banner/Justin Hammer for @winterhulk (@marvelrarepairbingo2022 Secret Santa Exchange)

A short while later, Bruce is dressed and ready to face whoever the hell brought him here. As he descends the spiral staircase, he hears funk music playing nearby: James Brown’s Get Up Offa That Thing. No AC/DC? Definitely not Tony.

At the bottom of the stairs is a roomy living space. One corner is a dining area, and the man at the table springs up and marches towards him. ‘Oh, hey! Good morning! I was starting to worry about you.’

Before he can respond, Bruce’s hand is grasped in a firm shake. ‘You were?’ he stutters.

‘Yeah. You were out for nearly fourteen hours. Must have needed the rest.’ He grins, flashing white teeth. ‘I’m Justin Hammer. I’m guessing you’ve heard of me?’

Of course: the perfectly-coiffed hair, the glasses, the grey suit with matching waistcoat… Justin Hammer has been all over the news lately. He’s not exactly the poster child of selfless acts.

Bruce glances around. There are no bars on the tall glass windows, and the place is full of very breakable furniture and ornaments. ‘Did you… kidnap me?’

‘Kidnap you?’ Justin looks scandalised. ‘Gosh no! Actually, you came to me. I found you unconscious in the snow after Hulk crashed out in my backyard – literally.’ He finally drops the handshake. ‘He also threw a semi into the koi pond, but I’ll get that fixed.’

Bruce laughs awkwardly. ‘Send Tony the bill. Um, I should go before I break anything else.’ He’s already backing away, wringing his hands. The less he has to do with Justin the better.

He’s halfway to the door when Justin calls, ‘You won’t stay for breakfast?’

The final word stops him in his tracks. Bruce is suddenly aware of the gnawing ache in his stomach. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You sure? We’ve got waffles, croissants, pancakes, French toast, avocado toast… all vegan, of course.’ When Bruce turns around, Justin shrugs and smiles. ‘Tony’s not the only one who can Google things. You’re like me, you like sweet things.’

The table is clustered with white plates on a blue tablecloth, all piled high with Bruce’s favourite breakfast foods. His mouth waters. ‘Just breakfast, huh? No strings attached?’

Justin sits down, already tucking a napkin into his shirt. ‘The door’s right there. We both know I can’t stop you.’

GammaTech delivers rugged Durabook R11 tablet in new configurations

Most of us do happen to carry a tablet around, and chances are we would also have taken the necessary steps to ensure that the tablet itself is well protected with some sort of case, or at the very least, a protective layer for the display to minimize the risk of scratches. Well, a rugged tablet is not an everyday occurrence, and to see GammaTech deliver the rugged Durabook R11 tablet in not just…

Being in charge of a software engineering organization, it always concerns me whether the software developed in my organization stands the test of quality from the perspective of the end users. This is always a challenge due to the inherent nature of measuring software quality. Obviously, there are metrics available to measure the quality but there is this one test what can bring the software and ultimately systems to a grinding halt. How does one find as many issues and come up with tests before the software goes out on the field? Static analysis is a extremely powerful tool which provides you with the set of issues in the software even before the software is run. The mechanisms for static analysis have significantly improved over the years and is now becoming a mandatory tool in the software engineer's arsenal. My first hand experience with Coverity Prevent has been extremely rewarding and it is worth considering to use it as part of any company's software engineering process. Some of the representative issues it will find even before you run your program for the first time are: 1. Locking erros 2. NULL pointer dereference 3. Use after free 4. Double free 5. Array indexing errors 6. Stack overrun 7. Heap overrun 8. Return pointers to local variables 9. Insecure use of user data 10. Uninitialized variables 11. Invalid use of negative values 12. Underallocations of dynamic data 13. Memory leaks 14. File handle leaks 15. Network resource leaks 16. Unused values 17. Unhandled return codes 18. Use of invalid iterators 19. Race conditions Some other vendors who provide similar static analysis tools are Fortify Software, GrammaTech, Klocwork and The Mathworks. Software is playing a critical role in all aspects of technology now. It is imperative that software makers adopt all tools available to provide the necessary software integrity to enjoy the technology we are so much dependent on. A nice blog on software integrity provides good information they have used at their company.

I did it. After a year of toil, I have finally completed my mini-masterpiece. Gammatech: The Fortress High in the Sky is now officially ready for play! Here's a little picture to celebrate:

So many Mr. Saturns! I think they might be plotting against me!

Play the level now! You have no excuse! Unless, of course, you don't have LBP 2, or a PS3...or an internet connection... But if you have all of those things then go here and queue up the level! My level deserves to be played!

Part 3 is almost complete! Which means that the whole level is almost complete! There's a couple little things here and there that I need to mess with, but other than that, the whole thing is almost done! I would have a picture of the level to show you, but the one I took ended up looking pretty bad...maybe it means that that part in-game looks bad.

In any case, this isn't the only good news that I have. I also made a multiplayer level! It's a deathmatch arena type deal similar to the Rocket Funland level in the Story mode. It seems like a pretty typical level, and being honest it is. (One reason I made it was to get a trophy.)

Yep, looks like Rocket Funland...without the rockets.

What sets it apart from other deathmatch levels, though, is that players can double jump by firing downwards!

You can't really tell by this picture but, the uppermost player just did a double jump. Exciting, isn't it?

There's also a strip of Attract-o-Gel up top that allows players to waltz along the ceiling, shooting fireballs at their enemies friends.

The guy on the right is aggressively trying to burn the guy on the left.

Players have a wide selection of music to choose from when tearing other Sackpeople apart, including Love Matter stolen from without permission borrowed from Fading_Monkey.

And that's only the first page! So many choices, I don't know which to choose!