A while ago, I wrote a web site named Healthwhere (I announced version 1 here about a month or so ago). It used ErnestMarples.com as one source of postcode data.

A few days ago, Ernest Marples disabled their service after getting a cease & desist letter from the Royal Mail. There's been quite a bit of press coverage about it (the BBC, the Guardian, the Register & Computer Weekly have all covered it).

Healthwhere has had a lot of hits over the last few days - there were more searches yesterday than during the whole of September. I figured that was because the stories linked to Ernest Marples, and Ernest Marples has a link to Healthwhere. Today, I realised the BBC story has a direct link to Healthwhere (in the "Related Internet Links", to the right of the main story).

Luckily, Healthwhere also uses postcode data from NPE, Free the Postcode and Dracos, so all the extra visitors have still been able to use the site.

I've been working on a couple of OSM-Related things, on-and-off, for a while, and I'm happy to announce that I've just released version 1.0 of both.

Healthware is a web site that uses the API & XAPI to find pharmacies (and, later, will also find hospitals). It's designed to run on any size screen, from the tiny little screen of my phone, to a full-sized monitor. Where the opening_hours tag has been added, it can work out whether a pharmacy is currently open or not. Source code is released under an MIT licence.

Secondly, OSM-Atlas is a PHP command-line script that uses a .osm file to create an atlas. It creates a PDF file, with front & back covers, overview map, detailed map pages, and index pages. This is also released under an MIT Licence.

Earlier this month, I wrote to various departments in the Falkland Islands governnment. The tourist board said they'd love to help, but didn't have any data that they could give me. They also said that the minerals department would be the only people that might have the data, but that they didn't own the copyright, so they wouldn't be able to help either.

However, a week or two later I got an e-mail from the Government Land Surveyor, who asked if I could use some dxf data (exported from AutoCAD). He's since sent data covering the road network of the Islands, street-level data for Stanley (the capital) and locations of all the settlements.

The Stanley data is now imported, and can be viewed on the Osmarender layer on the slippy map the Mapnik layer doesn't show it yet)