Thoughts.random

Photos from Tuesday's NYC exploration. Started by going to the Empire State Building. Snapped a picture of Madison Square Garden on the way. Went to the 86th of the Empire State Building, and snapped a few pics. Walked heaps of blocks to Central Park, where I went to the zoo (east side), then crossed through it (taking a bunch of pics) to get to the Museum of Natural History on the west side, which I explored only 1 floor before I had to head back. Didn't have time in the day to get to the other art museums alongside the park. Flights out tomorrow at 5pm. Will probably spend most of the day resting/sleeping, cause once I board the flight, I'm not getting any sleep for 28 hours... It's been a blast, but can't wait to get home.

Photos from Monday's NYC exploration. Covered nearly everything south of 42nd Street (where the Port Authority Bus Terminal is). Hopped on a bus tour, which went by Little Italy, and through Chinatown and the Financial District. Hopped off at Battery Park. Took a helicopter ride from Battery Park pier, up to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and then back. Then walked to the Freedom Tower and 9/11 memorial site. Each of the basements of the fallen buildings is now a water feature with names of those who died written around it. Took the tour bus back to 42nd street, finished off with Times Square before heading back to the hotel.

Day 3, and the convention, now finished. 58,797 present at Metlife Stadium, with a combined total of 140,257 when including conventions linked in to the program. Program concluded with another wonderful release, and then all special missionaries that were present (brought by the branch to attend) walked onto the field and we all sang together the final song, Song 91 entitled "My Father, My God and Friend".

Day 2 complete. 57,120 people in attendance today. Including the 10 congregations linked in, 136,784 people were linked in to hear the final talk of the day by Bro. David Splane. Exact number of baptismal candidates not known yet. I lost count after around 280. Some pictures above of the baptismal candidates standing, and queueing for the baptism pools. The baptismal candidates had to shout their responses. When they did, the whole auditorium could hear them, and erupted into applause. Another new release at the end of the day, won't spoil what it is, but I'll say it is awesome! :-P One more day to go... then a few days exploring New York, and then on my way back home. Time has flown...

Day 1 is complete. A little under 53,400 in attendance on a Friday, expecting much more tomorrow (into the 60,000s). Had 3 new releases... not going to spoil them for you though :-) Also, a new feature of conventions, pre-recorded video interviews, were used multiple times throughout the day. Bro. David Splane of the Governing Body was in person at the Metlife Stadium to give two talks today, both really encouraging. His talks were broadcast to other conventions happening at the same time. Total attendance of ours + all linked in: 120,662 And haha. I said in my last post "pray for sun"... we got it.... too much of it infact :-P 27C nearly all day, it was sweltering. A kind family lent me an umbrella so the sun wasn't beating down. I still got soaked (from sweat) sitting under the umbrella. Gotta find a shadier spot tomorrow or hope there is at least one cloud to block it (clear blue skies today 0_o). The joys of an open roofed stadium.

MetLife Stadium, the reason I',m here. Starting tomorrow (Fri, Sat, Sun in New Jersey), the 2014 international convention of Jehovahs Witnesses begins. It's an open roofed stadium, so pray for sun! :-) The stadium holds 82,000 people, though we hear they are expecting only about 60,000 to attend, of which around 3500 are international delegates, of which I'm one. Will post an update after the convention has ended (no spoilers though ;-) )

Massive room full of printery equipment at Jehovah's Witnesses Wallkill complex. The printing of magazines has been moved to Canada, but this facility still produces other things, mainly Bibles and other books.

Beautiful scenery at Jehovah's Witnesses Patterson complex.

Congregation halls of: * Pompton Lakes, NJ - Public morning witnessing program * Burgenfield, NJ - Evening gathering with fellow delegates

New York City skyline from the roof of the Jehovah's Witnesses world headquarters.

Tours and exquisite photos from the tour of Brooklyn headquarters.

Jehovah's Witnesses World Headquarters boldly highlighting JW.org to all nearby.

Inside the main auditorium of the Stanley Theatre in Jersey City.

My hotel. My room is on the 10th floor and has a view over a nearly business, a plot of land being developed, and a main road.

39 hours of traveling in cars, waiting at airports, plane flights, customs, shuttles, and taxis, but I'm finally here, checked in at the hotel in New Jersey. It's 1:30am, I've had 3 hours sleep in that whole travel period, and I haven't eaten anything substantial in over 12 hours, so I ordered food from a late night pizzeria before I crash. Gotta get up at around 5:30am to get ready for the welcome party in the hotel lobby at 6am. Will post some pictures tomorrow night when I have more time and mental ability.

TL;DR: Upgrade to Ruby 2.0.0 now! This article is not a guide on upgrading. Plenty of tools make this easy (like RVM) and plenty of articles on the web that describe the process. This article looks at some nice speed boosts you'll gain by upgrading. Ruby 2.0.0 is nearly a piece of cake to upgrade. On a fairly large application, not one of my tests failed when I switched from 1.9.3 to 2.0. After upgrading, you'll notice some speed boosts. Here are some I measured. These continue of from the last set of benchmarks I did last year ("Dramatically speeding up Ruby 1.9.3") and using the same computer and compile flags as I used in that article. % time ruby -e "count = 0; while(count < 100000000); count = count + 1; end; puts count" Before: 3.2s After: 2.0s % time bundle exec rails runner 'true' Before: 6.6s After: 4.9s % time bundle exec rake routes Before: 6.8s After: 4.9s % time bundle exec rspec spec Before: 3m 17s After: 2m 53s Conclusion: The speed boosts are good, and as the ruby GC (among other things) gets better, these will improve even more. The upgrade is simple, and issue free. You're doing yourself and those that work with you a dis-service if you don't plan to upgrade to Ruby 2.0.0 soon.

After reinstalling Ruby 1.9.3 recently, it felt a lot slower than it was previously. Thankfully, I stumbled upon some blog posts that deal with this issue. Check these out: http://spin.atomicobject.com/2012/11/06/is-your-application-running-with-ruby-slow/ http://alisnic.net/blog/making-your-ruby-fly/ I decided to give it a go. I didn't compile ruby with the falcon patch, just stock ruby 1.9.3 with the CFLAGS set. I put the following into my ~/.rvmrc file: rvm_configure_env=(CFLAGS="-march=nocona -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe") (the march of nocona is for my computers CPU. You will need to find the correct one for your CPU or compiling will fail) Then I ran 'rvm reinstall 1.9.3'. Here are the results (the times are the lowest out of three runs of each command): % time ruby -e "count = 0; while(count < 100000000); count = count + 1; end; puts count" Before: 7.5s After: 3.2s % time bundle exec rails runner 'true' Before: 12.4s After: 6.6s % time bundle exec rake routes Before: 12.5s After: 6.8s % time bundle exec rspec spec Before: 5m 53s After: 3m 17s Conclusion If you haven't compiled Ruby with optimizations, you're unnecessarily slowing your application. Updated 26th Nov 2012 I followed the additional advice in the references above and tried the falcon patch. The results are impressive. Check out these comparisons between just CFLAGS and CFLAGS+falcon patch. % time ruby -e "count = 0; while(count < 100000000); count = count + 1; end; puts count" Before: 3.2s After: 3.2s % time bundle exec rails runner 'true' Before: 6.6s After: 4.9s % time bundle exec rake routes Before: 6.8s After: 5.0s % time bundle exec rspec spec Before: 3m 17s After: 2m 57s Conclusion Set the CFLAGS for your system and compile ruby 1.9.3 with the falcon patch. You'll save yourself a heaps of time :-)