docs: def UrlGet(url, timeout=10, retries=0):
    """ Retrieve content from the given URL. """
     # in Python 2.6 we can pass timeout to urllib2.urlopen
    socket.setdefaulttimeout(timeout)
    attempts = 0
    content = None
    while not content:
        try:
            content = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
        except urllib2.URLError:
            attempts = attempts + 1
            if attempts > retries:
                raise IOError('Failed to fetch url: %s' % url)
    return content