As Jesse writes, Trent revealed the existence of Snakebite yesterday. Snakebite is an "open network" of various machines that Trent and others (myself included) are making available to the Python community for build and debug purposes. I'm coordinating the MSU component, which basically means that I run interference for Trent with MSU higher-ups and provide power & network; Trent bought almost all of the machines himself on e-bay and has done 99.9% of the work so far.

And that's pretty much the entire story, minus the blood, guts, and delivery of excessively large quantities of excessively large boxes to my doorstep here at MSU...

There will be a discussion session about Snakebite at PyCon '09, so stay tuned.

Incidentally,one of the real pleasures of being a professor is that I get to throw my support behind worthy projects like this one. MSU has been amazingly good so far, and the Computer Science department in particular has opened their doors for us. Here's to an open source future here at MSU, and elsewhere too!

--titus