The UN Jobs site is useful as a compendium of what postings are being opened where, but as an information system it is nigh on useless. There is no way to track what you have seen and what you haven't seen, and no way to tell precisely what is new between now and the last time you visited (the new postings page notwithstanding).

I've written a small screenscraper which pulls down all the postings and converts them to an rss file. I don't know about other feed readers, but liferea can read from a local file. There's a ton of dependencies like BeautifulSoup and PyRSS2Gen, but anyone with a little motivation should be able to get this working.

Following up to that last presentation, I've uploaded here the slide deck I used to deliver a training workshop at the Sanabel 2007 conference in Sanaa, Yemen.

CC licensed again, ppt for the usual reasons.

I monitor media pretty extensively for open source news, and I remember when this article came out in November actually! A party I work with has - with all good intentions and in the interest of fostering debate - called it out as noteworthy, which has given me a chance to rebut some of the FUD and misconceptions in that article around open source. Time has been a constraint as I have had to provide rapid turnaround, but this should do for a quick rebuttal.

Searching BBC news (always elegant to use the same source for counter argument) for mention of "open source", restricting the search to the news section (I hope we're not missing any news about open source in sport!), and sorting by relevance yields 25 pages of results at ten hits per page.

Now, let us look at the first 3 pages (or 30 results) to find how many pro and anti open source articles there are:

PRO open source: 19
NEUtral: 11
ANTI open source: 0

This is priceless. From the site of The Globalization Institute comes this gem from their internship FAQ:

Should I list the United Nations as my favourite website?

We get dozens of applications from people who claim their favourite website is the United Nations. But let's face it, www.un.int is no one's favourite website. Not even Kofi Annan's. Keep it real.

Yemen exists primarily, one suspects, to provide a definition logic by providing a diametric opposite. As I post this I'm sitting in Sanaa airport waiting for my flight to Amman, and I would be enjoying my first wireless connection in a week if it were not slower than the dialup I've had to make do with.

Out of the 20 odd million people, something like 50% (60 something persent of men and 30 something percent of women) are perpetually drugged on khat. It probably affects the remaining 50% given that the environment can't be too stimulating when one out of every two citizens is stoned as a matter of lifestyle.

This is not a critical post, it is observational. A friendlier people than the Yemenis are hard to find. The picture herein attests to this, taken in a vilage in the southern governorate of Abyan.

Children in Abyan