This month I co-founded HANDI, a new not-for-profit venture. - The Healthcare App Network for Development and Innovation with a few others in the healthcare sector. We are a group of clinicians, developers, health informaticians and others who believe that lightweight healthcare apps for patients, carers and health and care professionals provide the key to enabling IT to transform of health and care. We believe that the app paradigm (which enables rapid development and deployment) is applicable on all devices and is not just about mobile. We want to encourage and support app developers. We know from our own experience that creating an app and getting it widely used can be a painful experience and have decided to establish HANDI as a new organisation to provide mutual support for developers of health and care apps and others interested in this area and want to invite you to join us. ...

Here is a piece co-authored by me published in the Guardian Healthcare Network on open source in the NHS. In my view the NHS would benefit greatly from greater use of open source, standards and data, according to the creators of the award-winning Open Me project: “The NHS technology environment could be described as a giant hairball – a Gordian knot of past policies, established practices, new initiatives and government objectives and an ever changing landscape of opportunity from new technology....

I spent Bank Holiday Monday at the Heritage Inn Community Event. It was good to meet with my neighbors and to build bridges, so we can work together for the benefit of our locality. Viva Cricklewood! Lovely chicken too.

Brent Council recently signed a deal with Crapita Business Services for council tax and business rates administration and IT support systems. Reported to be worth £15m over 5 years, the function of the contract is to increase the council tax collection rate, with Crapita giving a guaranteed a collection rate for council tax and an anticipated £4.6 million in savings for the Council over the initial term of the contract....

After much fruitless searching for helpful documentation to assist me in setting up the VPN services on a Cisco RV 120W to work with the open source client from Shrew Soft, I thought I’d better make a post here to help others. I’m setting up the VPN to use xauth (usernames and passwords) to authenticate sessions. I want to allow DNS/WINS through the VPN tunnel and I want to allow ‘split tunnelling’ so that internet access still functions while the tunnel is up. I found a very helpful PDF guide to getting the Cisco device configured from [After much fruitless searching for helpful documentation to assist me in setting up the VPN services on a Cisco RV 120W to work with the open source client from Shrew Soft, I thought I’d better make a post here to help others. I’m setting up the VPN to use xauth (usernames and passwords) to authenticate sessions. I want to allow DNS/WINS through the VPN tunnel and I want to allow ‘split tunnelling’ so that internet access still functions while the tunnel is up. I found a very helpful PDF guide to getting the Cisco device configured from](http://www.thegreenbow.com/) who produce VPN client software. The PDF for that guide is here. I also found a PDF guide written by Cisco to getting the Shrew Soft client to talk to a Cisco SA 500. There is another technote on configuring the SA500 to accept the connections from a Shrew Soft client too, which is quite helpful. Read on for the recipe. ...