Best way to get from Heathrow (LHR) to Watford Junction for the Harry Potter Studio Tour

I'm in the planning stages of a trip with my daughter to the Harry Potter Studio Tour in Watford, England. As I've started gathering resources I thought I'd post them here in the hopes of saving the next parent a few hours of research...

1. Start by booking your studio tickets. These seems to sell fast and should be booked at the start of the planning process.

http://www.wbstudiotour.co.uk/

2. Now that you have your tickets, it is time to sort out how to get there from Heathrow. Although it is only about 20 miles, I've found that taxis in London can be both slow and very expensive (traffic). There are two public transport options that I've found.

a. Rail Service
It seems as though each ticket is about $40 and the trip takes roughly an hour. You can view schedule etc. on the national rail website
http://ojp.nationalrail.co.uk/

Getting to the train station from LHR is pretty easy - there are bus/shuttle services that will take you there and there are manned ticket stations where you can ask about tickets.

b. A better option (although I haven't taken it yet) seems to be the easy bus  - for a whopping $2.00 per person you can take a direct service no transfer bus from Heathrow straight to Watford.
http://www.easybus.co.uk/london-heathrow/heathrow-bus-timetable

Although a bus isn't as romantic as a train - the price and lack of transfer makes this a pretty appealing option...

http://www.easybus.co.uk/

The studio tour website says there is a free shuttle from the train station to the studio - I'll post the details after we've made the trek.


3. Book your evening stay in Watford
As we will be flying into London from the US, we'll be plenty tired by the end of the day - the tour is supposed to take 3 hours (we'll see...) so I think our best bet will be to stay in Watford proper. The best options for hotel can be found on trip advisor here:
http://www.tripadvisor.com

We've chosen to stay at  Holiday Inn express.

4. Figure out how to get around before you get there.
For this I love google maps - particularly the street view.

View Larger Map


I strongly advise using the street view option to get the "lay of the land" before you go over - this makes it much less disorientating after you arrive. You can literally walk the route to your hotel before you even get there.

Good luck and enjoy your trip!

Sledding in spring time

Because at the end of the day, what could be better than taking my 7 month old sledding in spring time?

An analysis of impact on page load time and latency when using the Google Appspot CDN

As I mentioned in a previous post, in the quest for speed i've been experimenting with Google as a CDN by hosting my large js and image files on google's app engine.

I've then been using monitor.us to execute periodic page load queries and plotting the results. So the test:
1. login.asp - this is a small .asp page that has light js files and a single image.
2. index.html (hosting on app engine). This is a very lightweight html file only (no image, no js, no css, no nothing).
3. index-test.html (same simple html file - only hosted on my hostmysite account).

I can then compare load times for all three to determine the impact on load times.



The top chart shows domestic and international load times for the host my site hosted index-test.

The middle chart shows the load times for index.html as hosted on app engine.

The bottom chart shows the load times for login.asp as hosted on hostmysite.com

My conclusion is that for domestic visitors there is very little impact in load times when using the google cdn, however for international visitors there is a gain to be had in the order of about 100 ms.

My recommendation would be to use the google CDN only if you have significant international traffic and/or have a js/css/image heavy site. If the main driver behind load times is the time for the page to compile you won't get much in the way of gain, if your traffic is primarily domestic, same thing.

Good luck and happy coding.

bill