Terah and I
went to the Greek island Rhodes recently. This is the second in a series about it.
I am one to enjoy history. There is something deeply, well, connecting, about standing in an old place. There is a timeless quality to it a feeling of being connected to so many people of the past, and yet still being connected to change, visible in things such as weathering of stones. To gaze at pottery that s 300 years old, walk past 700-year-old walls, or pass through what remains of the grand portico of an ancient temple to Athena stirs a feeling I can barely explain, of timelessness.
Although Rhodes doesn t have the famous Greek sites such as the Parthenon or Delphi, I can t help but wonder why the Rhodes sites aren t better known. They were incredible and it is hard to condense all that we saw into a short blog post.
I have to start with the medieval Rhodes Old Town. We got off the bus a few blocks from it one bright morning, and our first task was to find a gate across the moat. Oh yes, A GATE ACROSS THE MOAT.
It s a dry moat, and that bridge off in the distance is the gate we were headed to. Outside of the outer wall is a nice quiet walking area. The moat and walls completely surround Old Town and, for the most part, date back about 500 years. The round stones you see on that picture, we were told, were likely surplus from catapults and other projectile weapons. Cross one line of walls and you come to another, with original canons still present. The Knights Hospitaller of St. John, which held Rhodes for a few centuries until the Ottomans captured it, sure knew how to build to impress.
The gate we happened to use was Amboise, the Grand Master s Gate. Right there is the stunningly rebuilt landmark Palace of the Grand Master. It is absolutely impossible for any photograph to begin to do this building justice. Between its imported Greek and Roman floors, to the grand nature of everything in it, and the archaeological museum in one corner, it was a fitting start to a visit to Old Town. Here s one of the main staircases.
Just near the Palace is quiet courtyard with an old door. Pass through that door and suddenly you re in the midst of the busy Old Town.
And among the landmarks in Old Town, the most prominent is Ippoton, the Avenue of the Knights. Along this avenue are the buildings built by the various nationalities of knights, many of which are historical sites in their own. Taken together, it is quite clear why Rhodes is said to be one of the world s best-preserved medieval cities.
Down at the other end of Ippoton is the Knights Hospital, which is now part of the archaeological museum.
Step off the Avenue a few blocks and you get to some quieter narrow streets just as old, in many cases.
On Sunday morning, we were able to visit Mount Filerimos. In contrast to the busy Rhodes, Filerimos had an air of quiet and still to it. It was the site of a monastery, two historic churches, and a landmark Italian cross on the mountaintop.
We arrived, and begin our visit with a walk up the quiet stone path.
When we got to the top, we walked past this peaceful church. As we walked past the outside, we heard the beautiful music of chant from indoors. We got to step in and listen to mass for a few minutes.
In typical fashion, directly in front of the church are two much older sites: one, the ruins of a temple to Athena, and the other a 4th-century Christian bapistery.
Rhodes is a popular tourist destination, and of course we saw plenty of popular sites (such as the grandmaster s palace). Filerimos had a few tourists too, but not as many.
I frequently like to operate on the plan of going wherever all the tourists aren t. And so, on Filerimos, that meant seeing what was behind the monastery. It started with this peaceful tree-lined path.
And the deserted, but intentionally open, gate led to the remains of a Byzantine fortress, which had been a staging area for both the Knights and the Ottomans before their campaigns to capture Rhodes. It also provided incredible views of the surrounding countryside.
The first historic site we had visited on our trip was the
Acropolis of Lindos, parts of which are 2300 years old. Here s a view of the mountain from the rooftop of the
Kalypso, our favorite restaurant in Lindos.
The columns of the temple to Athena Lindia are visible, and of course so are the walls.
The road up to the acropolis is accessible only on foot or by donkey. It is apparently the only road that has ever been used to get to the acropolis. Here is the partially-restored grand portico to the temple.
There s an old Christian church (4th century, if memory serves) at the Acropolis too.
The Acropolis makes some pretty good use of natural defenses too. Here s a view from one level of it. There s a manmade wall up there at the very top. And, of course, the beautiful Aegean always in the background.
There are lots of cats on Rhodes. Here is a kitten napping at the top of the Lindos Acropolis:
Lindos itself is a beautiful town. Here s one of the quieter streets:
Notice the pebble steps leading into the houses those intricate pieces of artwork are all over.
This post won t be complete without the story of our visit to the Acropolis of Rhodes. We walked there from Old Town. At the Acropolis, there are the remains of a temple to Apollo, an ancient theater, and an ancient stadium where qualifying matches for the Olympics were held.
As we got closer to the area, we were repeatedly passed by people dressed in uniforms of various types. And as we got there, we joined a stream of people entering the area. The ancient stadium had apparently thousands of people in it, country names were being read off over the loudspeakers, policemen wielding machine guns were standing by, and we had absolutely no idea what was going on.
At this point, you can appreciate the difference between Terah and me. Terah thought that we have no idea what is happening, she was tired from the walk, and so thought we should just leave. I thought that we have no idea what is happening, which is a great reason to stay. So Terah opted to sit and read a bit under some trees while I explored.
Here s a view of the stadium as it was emptying out, seen from the theater:
I explored the temple and theater, and eventually we were ready to head back. We knew there was a bus back to the New Market (from where we could get a bus back to our hotel), but didn t know where the bus stop was. The obvious place to ask were the policemen, which I thought I would do. Terah thought she would just stay sitting under the trees, on the grounds that the policemen nearest us were all carrying machine guns and perhaps wouldn t like to be disturbed. This led to
my cryptic tweet:
Only ONE of us is the kind of person that goes up to guys with machine guns to ask what s happening. Me to Terah today
They told me that it was the preparations for the opening ceremony for a global shooting contest, and also gave me directions to the bus stop.
Howdy y all
Two of the main things I ve been working on since I started at Xamarin are making it easier for people to try out the latest bleeding-edge Mono, and making it easier for people on older distributions to upgrade Mono without upgrading their entire OS.
Public Jenkins packages
Every time anyone commits to Mono git master or MonoDevelop git master, our public Jenkins will try and turn those into packages, and add them to repositories. There s a garbage collection policy currently the 20 most recent builds are always kept, then the first build of the month for everything older than 20 builds.
Because we re talking potentially broken packages here, I wrote a simple environment mangling script called mono-snapshot. When you install a Jenkins package, mono-snapshot will also be installed and configured. This allows you to have multiple Mono versions installed at once, for easy bug bisecting.
Dear FSF, stop 
You can download the new release from 
It feels like I'm sitting in a roller-coaster wagon. There's probably
too much change going on for me to assimilate naturally. In
particular:
I just wrapped up (well, mostly) one of the toughest Uni semestres. I had
to deal with lots of very time consuming assignments, and then the usual
round of final exams. Even if this semester I got the best marks in my
journey (or shall we say Via Crucis) through University, I still
managed to fail one exam, for the Advanced Networks subject, which is
quite annoying, given I got high marks (even the highest in one case) in
other subjects I really don't master at all. In any case, this is the end
of the pain. The only thing that's left is just one exam and a project
based on GNU/Linux technologies which will basically mean formatting for
prettyness the sysadmin docs we've been collecting at the office during
the last few years. This effort will be nothing to what I've been doing
during the past 18 months, so I'm really relieved to have it past me
already.
Getting rid of studies comes just two weeks before a big change in my
professional career. Friday was my last day at the
When I was first approached about this, I thought Collabora was a small
company. But as I looked more into it, I discovered that's not longer the
case, there's many more people than I imagined working there (here!), and
was delighted to see I knew many of them, and many other are well known
members of the major Free Sofware communities. I'll be joining the
sysadmin team to work closely with
Nothing special here. You would have seen a similar window before if you have installed apport. What changes with this release is, that now, when you check the Send an error report to help fix this problem, it will really file a bug report on the BTS.Here's what the emailed bug report will look like: 
Sarah and I are running in the 5K