timeout with threading

I'd gotten the impression that python's threading module was a very frightening thing, and had put off getting to know it. That's too bad, because when I finally looked at it, it provided a very simple way to add timeouts to some of my code. And - unlike os.fork(), etc. - it works on Windows!

    t = threading.Thread(target=self.code)    
    t.start()
    t.join(self.timeout)
    if t.isAlive():
        completed = False
        self.msg = 'Timed out after %s seconds' % (self.timeout)
        if self.killOnTimeout:
            t._Thread__stop()