timeoutsocket enables a timeout mechanism on all TCP connections.  It
does this by inserting a shim into the socket module.  After this module
has been imported, all socket creation goes through this shim.  As a
result, every TCP connection will support a timeout.

The beauty of this method is that it immediately and transparently
enables the entire python library to support timeouts on TCP sockets.

WWW: http://www.timo-tasi.org/python/timeoutsocket.py