On smoking..

I'm quite surprised that the total smoking ban (in enclosed spaces) went through. I've been pestering my MPs about it for a while, but didn't seriously expect it to come about.

I may have accidentally ranted about it on Aaron's journal though. Sorry dude. People who get all "it's my god given right to smoke over anyone else I like and how dare the government try and stop me!" tend to get my hackles right up. I don't care if you want to smoke - but you've had about 120 years to develop some sort of smokeless version, and you've missed your chance.

Only downside is that now there'll be even more cig butts littering the streets as people frantically puff away before going indoors. :/

BBC's Climate Change thing

Some of you might have noticed that the BBC is running a distributed-computing thing for Climate change predictions.

You might be interested to know that they are using the open-source BOINC project to handle it, so you can run this stuff on loads of operating systems. Gentoo has BOINC in Portage as sci-misc/boinc. The UNIX versions have a headless server mode with remote GUI support, which is nice.