Author Archives: Gruff Davies

Vitamin D Prophylaxis Can End The Pandemic

We have been calling for vitamin D to be used to fight COVID19 since March – now seven months. The evidence was overwhelming then but fell on deaf ears. We published a preprint of a formal proof that vitamin D could end the pandemic six weeks later in May, urgently calling for goverments to useContinue reading “Vitamin D Prophylaxis Can End The Pandemic”

Are we having a second wave? Of stupidity, yes.

Are we having a second wave of COVID-19? No! We haven’t even finished the first wave yet, and a second wave – if it happens* – wouldn’t start until winter. So, why did Matt Hancock tell us we are? Because the UK government and their advisors are scientifically illiterate. * 2021 UPDATE: I was clearlyContinue reading “Are we having a second wave? Of stupidity, yes.”

A neat MySQL hack to create a VIEW with subquery in the FROM clause…

I’ve grown to love MySQL, but every now and then it has some strange restriction that temporarily stumps me. Then I discover a marvelous workaround and fall in love with it all over again. This hack lets you overcome the restriction that you’re not allowed to have a subquery in FROM clause of a VIEW.  The trick is toContinue reading “A neat MySQL hack to create a VIEW with subquery in the FROM clause…”

Writing games in HTML5 and CoffeeScript combining Box2D and EaselJS in an OOP/MVC architecture

Crap. That was a mouthful. There seems to be a huge amount of stuff on Her Majesty’s Interwebs about all of these topics, but very little explaining how to pull them all together into something coherent. There’s a shit-ton of bad code to copy to get something bouncing around on screen, but none of it cares about scaling wellContinue reading “Writing games in HTML5 and CoffeeScript combining Box2D and EaselJS in an OOP/MVC architecture”

How to write DRY SQL in MySQL – Part 2: Stored Procedure Hacks

In Part 1 we looked at using VIEWS to keep our SQL DRY. Unfortunately, there are cases when VIEWS are either not allowed or perform terribly and can’t be optimised.  Stored Procedures are, of course, the mainstay of writing DRY SQL, and optimisation.  Unfortunately, you can’t treat the result set of Stored Procedure as a query; therefore you can’t join storedContinue reading “How to write DRY SQL in MySQL – Part 2: Stored Procedure Hacks”