need a thread to keep a socket connection alive?

[Roy Smith]

"Fredrik Lundh" <fredrik at pythonware.com> wrote:
> however, creating a buffered layer for reading is a trivial problem: just call
> makefile on the socket object, and use the resulting object as a file handle:

The problem with that is that makefile() requires the socket to be in 
blocking mode.  If you're going to be implementing heartbeat, that's 
probably not what you want.