Josef “Jeff” Sipek

I realize that I haven’t mentioned Unleashed on my blahg before. The major reason for it was that whenever I thought of doing that, I ended up working on Unleashed instead. Oops! :)

For those that don’t know, Unleashed was an operating system fork created by me and Lauri in 2016. A fork that we’ve maintained till now. I said was, because earlier this month, we made the last release. Instead of trying to summarize everything again, let me just quote the relevant parts of the announcement email I sent out on April 4th:

This is the fifth and final release of Unleashed—an operating system fork of illumos. For more information about Unleashed itself and the download links, see our website [1].

That is right, we are pulling the plug on this project. What began as a hobby project for two developers never grew much beyond being a hobby project for two developers. But after nearly 4 years of work, we proved that the illumos code base can be cleaned up significantly, its APIs modernized, and the user experience improved in general.

While we’ve made too many changes [2] to list them all here, I’d like to highlight what I think are some of our major accomplishments:

• shrinking the codebase by about 25% (~5.6 million lines of code) even though we imported major components (e.g., libressl, openbsd ksh)
• reducing build times drastically (from ~40 minutes to ~16 minutes on a 2012-era 4 core CPU)
• changing uname to Unleashed and amd64 (from SunOS 5.11 i86pc)

In addition to the projects we finished, we were well on the way to several other improvements that we simply haven’t gotten around to completing. Some of the more notable ones include:

• page cache rewrite (~3/5 done)
• modernizing the build system with bmake / removing dmake (~1/5 done)
• everything 64-bit only (~4/5 done)

All that we’ve accomplished is just the tip of the iceberg of what remains to be done. Unfortunately for Unleashed, we both decided that we wanted to spend our free time on different projects.

I know I’m biased, but I think we’ve made some good changes in Unleashed and I’d love to see at least some of them make their way into illumos-gate or one of the illumos distros. So, I hope that someone will have the time and interest to integrate some of these changes.

Finally, I’d like to encourage anyone who may be interested not to be afraid of forking an open source project. Even if it doesn’t work out, it is extremely educational.

…

Happy hacking!

Jeff.

[1] https://www.unleashed-os.org
[2] https://repo.or.cz/unleashed.git/blob/HEAD:/FEATURES.txt

What Unleashed was or wasn’t is described on the website, the README, the features file, and the mailing list archives. The history leading up to Unleashed is essentially undocumented. I am dedicating the rest of this post to that purpose.

Jeffix (2015–2016)

Before Unleashed there was Jeffix.

I made an extremely indirect mention of Jeffix on Twitter in 2015, and one direct mention in a past blahg post in 2016.

So, what exactly was Jeffix? Was it a distro? Not quite. It was more of an overlay for OpenIndiana Hipster. You weren’t able to install Jeffix. Instead, you had to install Hipster and then add the Jeffix package repository (at a higher priority), followed by an upgrade.

Why make it? At the time I used OpenIndiana (an illumos distro) on my laptop. While that was great for everyday work, being an illumos developer meant that I wanted to test my changes before they made it upstream. For about a year, I was running various pre-review and pre-RTI bits. This meant that the set of improvements I had available changed over time. Sometimes this got frustrating since I wouldn’t have certain changes just because they didn’t make it through the RTI process yet and I was testing a different change.

So, in October 2015, I decided to change that. I made a repo with an assortment of my changes. Some are mine while others are authored by other developers in the community. I called this modified illumos Jeffix. Very creative, I know.

I kept this up until May 2016. Today, I have no idea why I stopped building it then.

To Fork or Not To Fork

For the three years leading up to Unleashed, I spent a considerable amount of time thinking about what would make illumos better—not just on the technical side but also the community side.

It has always been relatively easy to see that the illumos community was not (and still is not) very big. By itself this isn’t a problem, but it becomes one when you combine it with the other issues in the community.

The biggest problem is the lack of clear vision for where the project should go.

Over the years, the only idea that I’ve seen come up consistently could be summarized as “don’t break compatibility.” What exactly does that mean? Well, ask 10 people and you’ll get 12 different opinions.

Provably hostile

There have been several times where I tried to clean up an interface in the illumos kernel, and the review feedback amounted to “doesn’t this break on $some-sparc-hardware running kernel modules from Solaris?”

In one instance (in August 2015), when I tried to remove an ancient specialized kernel module binary compatibility workaround that Sun added in Solaris 9 (released in 2002), I was asked about what turned out to be a completely ridiculous situation—you’d need to try to load a kernel module built against Solaris 8 that used this rather specialized API, an API that has been changed twice in incompatible ways since it was added (once in 2005 by Sun, and once in April 2015 by Joyent).

Unsurprisingly, that “feedback” completely derailed a trivial cleanup. To this day, illumos has that ugly workaround for Solaris 8 that does absolutely nothing but confuse anyone that looks at that code. (Of course, this cleanup was one of the first commits in Unleashed.)

While this was a relatively simple (albeit ridiculous) case—I just had to find a copy of old Solaris headers to see when things changed—it nicely demonstrates the “before we take your change, please prove that it doesn’t break anything for anyone on any system” approach the community takes.

Note that this is well beyond the typical “please do due diligence” where the reviewers tend to help out with the reasoning or even testing. The approach the illumos community takes feels more like a malicious “let’s throw every imaginable thought at the contributor, maybe some of them stick.” Needless to say, this is a huge motivation killer that makes contributors leave—something that a small-to-begin-with community cannot afford.

Toxic

In the past there have been a number of people in the illumos community that were, in my opinion, outright toxic for the project. I’m happy to say, that a number of them have left the community. Good riddance.

What do I mean by toxic?

Well, for instance, there was the time in 2014 when someone decided to contribute to a thread about removing SunOS 4.x compatibility code (that is binary compatibility with an OS whose last release was in 1994) with only one sentence: “Removing stuff adds no value.”

Elsewhere in the same thread, another person chimed in with his typical verbiage that could be summarized as “why don’t you do something productive with your time instead, and work on issues that I think are important.” While his list of projects was valid, being condescending to anyone willing to spend their free time to help out your project or telling them that they’re wasting their time unless they work on something that scratches your or your employer’s itch is…well…stupid. Yet, this has happened many times on the mailing list and on IRC over the years.

Both of these examples come from the same thread simply because I happened to stumble across it while looking for another email, but rest assured that there have been plenty of other instances of this sort of toxic behavior.

The Peanut Gallery

Every project with enough people on the mailing list ends up with some kind of a  peanut gallery. The one in illumos is especially bad. Every time a removal of something antique is mentioned, people that haven’t contributed a single line of code would come out of the woodwork with various forms of “I use it” or even a hypothetical “someone could be using it to do $foo”.

It takes a decent amount of effort to deal with those. For new contributors it is even worse as they have no idea if the feedback is coming from someone that has spent a lot of time developing the project (and should be taken seriously) or if it is coming from an obnoxiously loud user or even a troll (and should be ignored).

2020

All this combined results in a potent mix that drives contributors away. Over the years, I’ve seen people come, put in reasonable effort to attempt to contribute, hit this wall of insanity, and quietly leave.

As far as I can tell, some of the insanity is better now—many of the toxic people left, some of the peanut gallery members started to contribute patches to remove dead code, etc.—but a lot of problems still remain (e.g., changes still seem to get stuck in RTI).

So, why did I write so many negative things about the illumos community? Well it documents the motivation for Unleashed. :) Aside from that, I think there is some good code in illumos that should live on but it can only do that if there is a community taking care of it—a community that can survive long term. Maybe this post will help with opening some eyes.

Unleashed

In July 2016, I visited Helsinki for a job interview at Dovecot. Before the visit, I contacted Lauri to see if he had any suggestions for what to see in Helsinki. In addition to a variety of sightseeing ideas, he suggested that we meet up for a beer.

At this point, the story continues as Lauri described it on the mailing list — while we were lamenting, Jouni suggested we fork it. It was obvious that he was (at least partially) joking, but having considered forking, it resonated with me. After I got home, I thought about it for a while but ultimately decided that it was a good enough idea.

That’s really all there is to the beginning of Unleashed itself. While the decision to fork was definitely instigated by Jouni, the thought was certainly on my mind for some time before that.

Next

With Unleashed over, what am I going to do next?

I have plenty of fun projects to work on—ranging from assorted DSP attempts to file system experiments. They’ll get developed on my FreeBSD laptop. And no, I will not resume contributing to illumos. Maybe I’m older and wiser (and probably grumpier), but I want to spend my time working on code that is appreciated.

With all that said, I made some friends in illumos and I will continue chatting with them about anything and everything.

As some of you already know, I’ve been working on my instrument rating over the past 5–6 months. As part of it, I had to figure out and understand the regulations governing when an alternate airport is needed and the required weather at the destination and alternate airports.

The first part is answered by 91.169(a) and 91.169(b). To give you taste of the regulations, here is (b):

(b) Paragraph (a)(2) of this section does not apply if:

(1) Part 97 of this chapter prescribes a standard instrument approach procedure to, or a special instrument approach procedure has been issued by the Administrator to the operator for, the first airport of intended landing; and

(2) Appropriate weather reports or weather forecasts, or a combination of them, indicate the following:

(i) For aircraft other than helicopters. For at least 1 hour before and for 1 hour after the estimated time of arrival, the ceiling will be at least 2,000 feet above the airport elevation and the visibility will be at least 3 statute miles.

(ii) For helicopters. At the estimated time of arrival and for 1 hour after the estimated time of arrival, the ceiling will be at least 1,000 feet above the airport elevation, or at least 400 feet above the lowest applicable approach minima, whichever is higher, and the visibility will be at least 2 statute miles.

Clear as mud, isn’t it?

The second question (the required weather at the destination and alternate airports) is answered by 91.169(c). Don’t worry, I won’t quote it here.

Since the text of the regulation is not easy to read, I decided that the best way to understand it is to make a flowchart. As I fly airplanes, I’ve ignored any part of the regulations that is about aircraft other than airplanes.

The result:

Clearer? I certainly think so!

The one big thing to keep in mind about this flowchart is that not every approach can be used during planning. This is a semi-large topic of its own.

In short, any approach that you aren’t authorized for, the plane isn’t equipped for, or that has a NOTAM saying that it isn’t available, effectively doesn’t exist. As far as GPS approaches are concerned, if you have a TSO 129 or 196 GPS, then you have another restriction—you cannot plan on using GPS approaches at both your destination and your alternate.

I found it useful to write this down and in the process truly understand the rules. Hopefully, you’ve found this useful as well. Needless to say, you should not rely on this flowchart without verifying that it is correct. Regulations sometimes change, and people sometimes make mistakes when making flowcharts to visualize said regulations. (If you find a problem, let me know!)

One final thought: just because the regulations don’t require an alternate airport doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have one anyway. Weather often seems to have a mind of its own and a propensity to prove forecasters wrong.

Recently I ended up playing with  Time-based One-time Passwords as a second factor when authenticating with various services. When I saw an RFC referenced in the references section, I looked at it to get a better idea of how complicated the algorithm really is. It turns out that TOTP is very simple. So simple that I couldn’t help but put together a quick and dirty implementation in Python.

TOTP itself is documented in RFC 6238. It is a rather short RFC, but that’s because all it really says is “use HOTP and feed it these values”.

HOTP is documented in RFC 4226. This RFC is a bit longer since it has to describe how the counter value gets hashed and the resulting digest gets mangled. Reading it, one will learn that the HMAC-SHA1 is the basic building block of HOTP.

HMAC is documented in RFC 2104.

With these three documents (and a working implementation of SHA1), it is possible to implement your own TOTP.

The Key

If you follow those four RFCs, you’ll have a working TOTP. However, that’s not enough to make use of the code. The whole algorithm is predicated on having a pre-shared secret—a key. Typically, the service you are enabling TOTP for will issue you a key and you have to feed it into the algorithm to start generating passwords. Since showing the user the key in binary is not feasible, some sort of encoding is needed.

I couldn’t find any RFC that documents best practices for sharing the key with the user. After a while, I found a Google Authenticator wiki page describing the format of the key URIs used by Google Authenticator.

It turns out that this is a very common format. It uses a base32 encoding with the padding stripped. (Base32 is documented in RFC 4648.)

The “tricky” part is recreating this padding to make the decoder happy. Since base32 works on 40-bit groups (it converts between 5 raw bytes and 8 base-32 chars), we must pad to the nearest 40-bit group.

The Code

I tried to avoid implementing HMAC-SHA1, but I couldn’t find it in any of the modules Python ships with. Since it is a simple enough algorithm, I implemented it as well. Sadly, it nearly doubles the size of the code.

Warning: This is proof-of-concept quality code. Do not use it in production.

import struct
import hashlib
import base64
import time

# The pre-shared secret (base32 encoded):
key = "VGMT4NSHA2AWVOR6"

def HMAC(k, data, B=64):
    def H(m):
        return hashlib.sha1(m).digest()

    # keys too long get hashed
    if len(k) > B:
        k = H(k)

    # keys too short get padded
    if len(k) < B:
        k = k + ("\x00" * (B - len(k)))

    ikey = "".join([chr(ord(x) ^ 0x36) for x in k])
    okey = "".join([chr(ord(x) ^ 0x5c) for x in k])

    return H(okey + H(ikey + data))

def hotp(K, C, DIGITS=6):
    def Truncate(inp):
        off = ord(inp[19]) & 0xf

        x = [ord(x) for x in inp[off:(off+4)]]

        return ((x[0] & 0x7f) << 24) | (x[1] << 16) | (x[2] << 8) | x[3]

    return Truncate(HMAC(K, struct.pack(">Q", C))) % (10 ** DIGITS)

def totp(K, T=time.time(), X=30, T0=0, DIGITS=6):
    return hotp(K, long(T - T0) / long(X), DIGITS=DIGITS)

# pad to the nearest 40-bit group
if len(key) % 8 != 0:
    key=key + ("=" * (8 - (len(key) % 8)))

key=base64.b32decode(key.upper())

print time.ctime(), time.time()
print "TOTP: %06d" % totp(key)

This code is far from optimal, but I think it nicely demonstrates the simplicity of TOTP.

References

• RFC 2104 — HMAC: Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication
• RFC 4226 — HOTP: An HMAC-Based One-Time Password Algorithm
• RFC 4648 — The Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data Encodings
• RFC 6238 — TOTP: Time-Based One-Time Password Algorithm
• Google Authenticator wiki

Recently a friend asked me about what I use for my pilot logbook. This made me realize that my logging is complicated and that I should probably make a blahg entry about it.

All in all, I have three logbooks to keep track of my flying.

Good ol’ paper logbook

This is the “official” one. In other words, if the FAA wants to see my logbook, that’s what I’ll show them. There’s not much more to say about it.

ForeFlight

This is my casual logbook. A while back I entered everything in, including more accurate counts (full stop vs. touch+go) and better divided up time counts (PIC vs. solo). I use this logbook to answer questions like “How much time do I have?” and “Am I current?”. It is also useful when chatting with people and I want to dig up an entry.

I also use it to keep track of  Hobbs vs.  tach time since I pay based on tach time.

A Repository

This is my custom analysis and archive logbook. In this Mercurial repository, I keep a giant JSON file with every entry with even more detail than what’s in ForeFlight.

Alongside it, I also keep a list of latitude/longitude/altitude information for each airport I’ve been to.

From these two files, I can generate various plots. For example, here is one:

This is a plot of all the airports I’ve ever landed at—color coded based on the year of my first landing there.

This repository also serves as a backup of my paper logbook (in case my physical logbook burns up, gets water damaged, etc.) and an archive of other flying related data. I accomplish this by keeping scans of the paper logbook, copies of any GPS tracklogs I’ve recorded, and so on in a couple of subdirectories.

Post-flight

At the end of each flight, I add an entry to my ForeFlight logbook. Usually, I have ForeFlight recording a tracklog, so a large part of the entry is auto-generated. The bits of info that I add manually are:

• tach time (useful for billing)
• time out/off/on/in (I’m trying to figure out how much time I “waste” on the ground to improve my planning accuracy)
• landing counts
• any remarks I wouldn’t remember later

Then, when I’m home and have time (this can be later that day, or 3 days later), I pull up the ForeFlight entry, improve/edit the remarks, double check that all the counts make sense (if needed I pull up the tracklog to recount the number of landings, etc.), and then write an entry into my paper logbook.

If I filled up a page of the paper logbook, I scan the two pages and drop them into the repository.

Depending on how I feel, I may update the repository logbook JSON file then and there or at some point later (in the past I’ve even waited for a month due to laziness). Usually, visiting a new airport is motivating enough.

This post is part of a series named “Europe 2017” where I share photos from my adventures in Europe during the summer 2017.

In mid-July 2017, I got to travel to Prague to participate in IETF’s 99th meeting.

The IETF meeting itself was great—lots of useful discussion about the next-generation email accessing protocol (called JMAP).

I stayed a couple of days extra to enjoy Prague, and Holly flew out from Helsinki to revisit Prague where she’s been once before—for our honeymoon.

I dragged my D750 and the two lenses with me and made to sure to take photos (almost) all the time. The gallery contains only a handful of the approximately 1100 raw files. Of those, I selected 11 for this blahg post.

 Malá Strana Bridge Tower:

 St. Nicholas Church with the  Žižkov Television Tower in the background:

 Matthias Gate with  St. Vitus Cathedral peeking in the background:

The  National Theatre:

 Charles Bridge and a view of  Old Town:

 St. Vitus Cathedral from  Petřín near sunset:

St. Nicholas Church again during sunset (and without the ugly Žižkov TV tower):

A gargoyle keeping the St. Nicholas Church’s masonry safe:

A view from the top of  Old Town Bridge Tower with roofs and towers of (left to right):

Church of Saint  Francis of Assisi, the left tower of  Church of Our Lady before Týn, the clock tower and the Astronomical tower of  Clementinum:

St. Nicholas Church yet again, this time from the Malá Strana Bridge Tower:

 Charles Bridge,  Old Town Bridge Tower, Church of Saint  Francis of Assisi, and  Žižkov Television Tower (from the Malá Strana Bridge Tower):

Prague offers a lot to see. The few photos I selected for this blahg post don’t show anywhere near enough of it. There are more photos in the gallery, but even those are merely highlights of what one can see in Prague. If you haven’t been to Prague yet, I highly recommend a trip.

Smart Clock: A New Time — Using three inexpensive wrist watches to achieve 1 second accuracy over an extended period of time.

Repairing the card reader for a 1960s mainframe: cams, relays and a clutch

The 555 Timer IC an Interview with Hans Camenzind—The Designer of the Most Successful Integrated Circuit Ever Developed

High-level Problems with Git and How to Fix Them — A Mercurial developer’s view of Git’s shortcomings.

Mailing lists vs Github

GDL 90 Data Interface Specification — Definition of the serial protocol used by  UAT receivers to feed the received data to  MFDs.

GDL 90 Extended Specification — ForeFlight’s extension to GDL 90.

This post is part of a series named “Europe 2017” where I share photos from my adventures in Europe during the summer 2017.

In late June 2017, Holly and I did a day trip to  Tallinn. This wasn’t the first time I was in Tallinn, so I knew what the interesting parts of the old town were. As always, there is a gallery with more photos.

Tallinn’s old town is a medieval pocket in a otherwise modern city. In some of the photos you can see the modern civilization right behind a medieval tower.

A view of the  Alexander Nevsky Cathedral from the tower of  St. Mary’s Cathedral:

The tower of St. Mary’s Cathedral:

A section of the fortification wall that remains:

I’ve been to Tallinn twice and all my time there was spent in the old town. This makes me far from an expert about what there is to do. With that said, I enjoyed my time there and I recommend a day trip to anyone visiting nearby.

This post is part of a series named “Europe 2017” where I share photos from my adventures in Europe during the summer 2017.

When I attended the Kaivopuisto Air Show in early June last year, I learned about the existence of the Finnish Aviation Museum. It took me a month and a half, but eventually I found a free day to go check it out.

The museum itself is packed with all sorts of aircraft on static display. While they were interesting (and I certainly took plenty of photos of them), they aren’t what this post is about. This post is about Lokki—a retired  DC-3 (registration OH-LCD) on display outside of the museum.

As luck would have it, the folks from the DC Association were there that day trying to see if they could start up Lokki’s engines—after 12 years of inactivity. After a lot of preparation, they managed to start them!

Without further ado, here are a few photos of Lokki (more photos can be found in the gallery).

 Aero OY was the original name of Finnair:

One of the mechanics working on the left engine:

One of the people from the DC Association, seeing that I was obviously excited about the plane, asked me if I’d like to climb inside. I said yes, of course.

The inside was pretty bare-bones (which is to be expected of a static display that’s normally closed to public). I took a couple of photos inside, but most weren’t that interesting.

Throttle quadrant (note: most of the instrument panel was removed long ago):

It runs!

The livery is pretty simple—polished aluminum with dark blue lettering and a stripe:

I’m not really sure why they wanted to see if they could start the engines, but I’m happy that it worked out. Radial engines just have a unique roar to them.

Anyway, that’s it about Lokki. Hopefully I’ll get around to post processing the photos from the museum itself soon.

This post is part of a series named “Modern Mercurial” where I share my realizations about how much Mercurial has advanced since 2005 without me noticing.

Last year, I had a realization that I haven’t been using Mercurial to its full potential. In this post, I’d like to share my thoughts about and usage of Mercurial Phases.

Phases are not a new feature. They made their first appearance back in 2012 as part of Mercurial 2.1, which makes them a little over 6 years old.

What are phases?

While there is a description of phases on the Mercurial wiki, I’ll take a stab at a short intro.

Each commit belongs to one of three phases (public, draft, or secret) which implies a set of allowed operations on the commit. Furthermore, the phase dictates which other phase or phases the commit can transition to.

You can think of the phases as totally ordered (secret → draft → public) and a commit’s phase can only move in that direction. That is, a secret commit can become either a draft or a public commit, a draft commit can become a public commit, and a public commit is “stuck” being public. (Of course if you really want to, Mercurial allows you to force a commit to any phase via hg phase -f.)

The allowed operations on a commit of a particular phase are pretty self-explanatory:

Public commits are deemed immutable and sharable—meaning that if you try to perform an operation on a commit that would modify it (e.g., hg commit –amend), Mercurial will error out. All read-only operations as well as pushing and pulling are allowed.

Secret commits are mutable and not sharable—meaning that all modifications are allowed, but the commits are not pullable or pushable. In other words, a hg pull will not see secret commits in the remote repository, and a hg push will not push secret commits to the remote repository.

Draft commits are mutable and sharable—a phase between public and secret. Like secret commits, changes to commits are allowed, and like public commits, pushing and pulling is allowed.

Or in tabular form:

By default, all new commits are automatically marked as draft, and when a draft commit is pushed it becomes public on both ends.

Note that these descriptions ignore the amazing changeset evolution features making their way into current Mercurial since they can blur the “not yet shared” nature of draft commits. (Perhaps I should have titled this post Modern Mercurial (2012 edition) — Phases.)

A note about hg log

Unfortunately, the default hg log output does not display phases at all. I think this is rather unfortunate (but understandable from a backwards compatibility point of view).

Last year, I dedicated a whole post to how I template hg log information including my reasoning for why I display phases the way I do.

How do I use phases?

Now that we have the basic introduction to phases out of the way, let me describe how I mapped them to my workflow.

First of all, I make all new commits start in the secret phase (instead of the default draft) with a quick addition to .hgrc:

[phases]
new-commit = secret

This immediately prevents an accidental hg push from pushing commits that I’m still working on. (Recall that secret commits cannot be pushed.) In at least one repository, this allowed me to regularly have more than 6 heads with various work-in-progress feature ideas without the fear of accidentally messing up a public repository. Before I started using phases, I used separate clones to get similar (but not as thorough) protections.

Now, I work on a commit for a while (keeping it in the secret phase), and when I feel like I’m done, I transition it to the draft phase (via hg phase -d). At that point, I’m basically telling Mercurial (and myself when I later look at hg log) that I’m happy enough with the commit to push it.

Depending on what I’m working on, I may or may not push it immediately after (which would transition the commit to the public phase). Usually, I hold off pushing the commit if it is part of a series, but I haven’t done the last-chance sanity checks of the other commits.

Note: I like to run hg push without specifying a revision to push. I find this natural (and less to type). If I always specified a revision, then phases wouldn’t help me as much.

“Ugly” repos

I have a couple of repositories that I use for managing assorted data like my car’s gasoline utilization. In these repositories, the commits are simple data point additions to a CSV file and the commit messages are repetitive one-liners. (These one-liners create a rather “ugly” commit history.)

In essence, the workflow these repositories see can be summarized as:

$ echo "2018-04-05,12345,17.231," >> data.csv
$ hg commit -m "more gas"
$ hg push

In these repositories, I’ve found that defaulting to the secret phase was rather annoying because every commit was immediately followed by a phase change to allow the push to work. So, for these repos I changed new-commit back to draft.

Edit: I reworded the sentence about Mercurial giving you a way to force a commit to any phase based on feedback on lobste.rs.

This post is part of a series named “Europe 2017” where I share photos from my adventures in Europe during the summer 2017.

In early June 2017, we attended an air show in  Kaivopuisto. Unfortunately, we found out about it last minute, and so we missed the beginning which included a Finnair Airbus A350 flyby. Pity.

The show included a number of trainers and combat aircraft performing various maneuvers. Here are the highlights (for more photos visit the gallery).

 Red Arrows:

A seagull joining in:

 Finnish Coast Guard’s  Turva nearby with  Suomenlinna visible behind it:

 Eurofighter Typhoon:

 Saab 35 Draken:

 Saab Gripen:

During one of the passes, I took a burst of images and then assembled them into a Southwest 737 “Airportrait”-style image.

Finnish Air Force  F-18 Hornet:

A Finnish aerobatics team  Midnight Hawks flying  BAE Systems Hawk:

Even though this post has more photos than I typically share, there are many more in the gallery. So, if you are into airplanes, I suggest you peruse it.