Terry Pratchett was a comedy fantasy author from Britain (which is an island of the coast of France). He is best known for the Discworld series of books (41 in all). He died in 2015, and as a tribute, fans around the world changed their servers to emit a hidden code with his name, taking cue from one of his books.

I wanted to do this in OpenStreetMap. We don’t want to change the OSM data, but the changeset tags are the secret metadata of OSM. In keeping with OSM convention of new tags, I’m choosing clacks_overhead=GNU Terry Pratchett. If you add that tag to your changesets, you can keep pTerry alive in the OSM metadata.

I’ve created a JOSM plugin (pTerry) to do this automatically. If you have a recent version of JOSM (v13028 or above, released today). For now, just download pTerry.jar and save it to ~/.josm/plugins/. I’ll put it on the JOSM plugins list in a bit when I know it’s OK.

A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.