The project of the week has been the Interactive Foliage Map, the anchor of Yankee’s foliage website.

For the past three years this map has run as an old-school MapServer-based application. It worked well for the time, but in the age of slippy-slidy interactive maps, it was showing its age.

The challenge was to somehow leverage our existing foliage infrastructure (yes, we have foliage infrastructure) that is based on collecting foliage reports on a county-by-county basis across New England as the basis for generating a colour-coded map.

The week started with some experimenting with generating county polygons, an effort aided greatly by this helpful PHP script that converts census county boundary files into sets of Google-friendly vertices.

This was all very promising on a single-county basis. But when scaled up to a New England-wide level — 247 counties with about 300,000 vertices — it all went to hell. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for JavaScript to do; too much, in fact, as interacting with the map, even on a peppy laptop with a powerful processor, was a slow as molasses.

I thought about doing some work to come up with a simplified set of county polygons, but decided to look elsewhere before launching into that.

Fortunately at this point I came across this very helpful resource from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a bit of well-documented JavaScript that lets layers from a Web Map Service (WMS) be overlaid on Google Maps.

A quick re-compile of our MapServer install to turn it into a WMS server and I was in business. It took me a little while to grok WMS, but once I did, I had foliage on my map in about an hour.

The idea here, in essence, is that the WMS server becomes an additional “tile making engine” for the Google Map, generating graphic images of the same sort that Google itself generates for the map and satellite layers. Because the hard work is being done server-side, and is bolstered by Google’s pre-fetching algorithms (that fetch neighbouring map tiles before you need them), it all appears quite magical when it’s working.

Once the magic was in place, the map got wrapped in some of the JavaScript and AJAX goodness that drives the Best Western map on Yankee’s main site (the magic there is clustering the Best Western markers differently at each zoom level so that two hotels never overlap each other).

Moving forward, the ability to drop any WMS layer on a custom Google Map — just look at the variety of WMS layers from Natural Resources Canada, for example — opens up a lot of interesting doors for cool map mashups.

The Interactive Foliage Map is a beta testing right now, and is scheduled to go live next week; you’re welcome to take it for a ride.

The second phase of Urban Eatery, which was supposed to open in June, finally opened, sort of, yesterday. Turns out that they were plagued with an opening day fume hood problem that meant they had to close early. So when [[Oliver]] and I showed up for supper at 7:00 p.m. we had to by satisfied with sandwiches. But when I stopped in for coffee this morning I was assured that today they will really be open.

Phase Two has four components: there’s a juice bar, an “around the world” station offering, well, food from around the world, the “ground-n-round” with meat-based fare, and the “urban grocer” which seems to be a sort of high-concept pocket-sized grocery store. Here are some spy photos:

First Rob, then Cynthia and now Dannie. My friends are slowly taking over politics. And it’s delightful when they blog about the nuts and bolts of public life.

I had lunch today at the Town and Country and instead of the usual I took my server’s recommendation and had the “Chicken Penang,” a new dish that’s not on the menu. It was fantastic — a nice combination of chicken and vegetables served over riced and spiced with a kick. Recommended.

This is, I think, our 14th summer on Prince Edward Island. And yet until last weekend we had never been to Cavendish Beach — the sort of “grand dame” of PEI beaches with the tourist set.

But, what with all the “day at the beach” frenzy swirling around us, we decided that Sunday would be a good day to try. Our resolve was enhanced when we discovered that access to the beach through “Cavendish Grove” — the rebadged fun-free Rainbow Valley — is free (it would have cost us almost $20 to go through the normal route).

The only thing you have to put up with to take this option is a 1 km hike to the beach. Fortunately it’s a nice hike through the woods. Always ready to walk a kilometer to save $20, we were sold.

It has been reported that “[e]ventually, Parks Canada intends to make Cavendish Grove the main entrance to this section of the national park, meaning a longer walk to Cavendish Beach.” So eventually the 1 km hike will become a fact of life for all. Might as well get used to it now.

The L.M. Montgomery Land Trust is holding a fundraising event this Sunday at the Cavendish Boardwalk called The Great Big Cornboil. The event starts at 1:00 p.m. and there will be corn. Boiling. For sale. To eat. And live entertainment. And much family fun and merriment. [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] and I will be there shucking the corn. I’m sure Oliver will do a little dance. If you’re looking for a fun Sunday lunch alternative that will help the Land Trust’s work, please drop by.

[[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] went to Old Home Week yesterday, and one of the things they took in was a cooking demonstration led by former [[Compass]] anchor Roger Younker — a sort of “Soup to Nuts” in aid of PEI-produced products.

Midway through the session I happened to call Catherine on her mobile, and midway through our call I heard a commotion and Catherine disappeared for a minute. Turns out that Oliver felt it important that Roger know that I was on the phone, so he walked up onto the stage to tell him. Roger, as you might expect, was confused.

Catherine, ever quick on her feet, quickly repositioned the purpose of Oliver’s romp by suggesting to Oliver that he ask Roger “what kind of cheese are you using.” Which, apparently, smoothed things out.

I thought I might take my bike out to the Charlottetown Mall to catch a movie, and then ride the bus back. But a call to the transit operator reveals that they don’t permit bicycles on the buses, nor do they have any provision for transporting them otherwise. Which would seem to be a big hole in building a convenient intermodal transportation in the capital area.

My friend Oliver reports that bikes ride free on California buses.

Looks like [[Timothy’s]], where you’ll find me for morning coffee and bagel many mornings, is moving around the corner to the space occupied by [[Café Soleil]] back in the 1990s. I just talked to impresario Campbell Webster about the move: their lease was up and they jumped at the chance to move to a bigger space.

Things are moving fast — they have to be out of the old space by August 31st. The new space, Campbell says, is twice as large, and so they should be a lot more room to ramble. Next door there’s a vintage clothing slash music shop moving in, and the two will be connected at the middle to afford cross-pollination opportunities.

The new Showtime program Californication somehow ended up on our “Movie Network on Demand” list last week, even though the series doesn’t premiere until tonight. So we watched. The highlight of the show is Natascha McElhone, I think; Madeleine Martin, who plays her daughter, is also pretty good. In fact even David Duchovny, recently in my “completely unwatchable” books after a long series of bad movies, turns in a decent performance. Dramatically (at least in the first episode) the show isn’t much more than a standard divorced couple struggling to raise their daughter in a crazy world drama, but it’s well written, and well shot.