I often have a need for a quick virtual machine. Many of them don't require any video output, so having a virtual monitor is a little overkill. Luckily, with a few QEMU switches and brief configuration of the guest VM, you can view console output in a standard terminal on the host system.

• linux

I've been blogging for ages, on various platforms and subjects. A lot of the early stuff is not fit for consumption, but I had nearly one hundred posts in an old LifeType blog that I neglected to import into my current Django site.

• housekeeping

Python's hasattr function checks to see if an object has an attribute - a fairly straightforward and sensible purpose. When I used it, however, it caused some very subtle problems that were tricky and unintuitive to debug.

• python

I've been "off the grid" for more or less the past six months. In case you were wondering why, here's an itemized list of my daily routine, expressed through my inner monologue.

• housekeeping
• family

Django assigns permissions to any user-submitted files it saves. If you don't explicitly set what these are, it uses an operating system default - which, in most cases, is 0600. If you're unfamiliar with unix-style file permissions, that means the following:

• python
• django
• linux
• server
• security