As an enthusiast of encryption, it always felt a little strange that my servers kept all of their data in the clear. But the problem with encrypting a headless server is that, inevitably, you have to reboot it. So how do you connect to your server and unlock the drive before it boots? It's quite the catch-22.

• linux
• server
• security

If you've ever needed to view all the changes that are happening in a repository or a branch, there are two flags for the git log command that should interest you: git log -c and git log --cc.

• git

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