Hi ServerTim:
Great! That worked for me too.
Not sure what the problem was so far. Did you do some magic? :). It will be nice if you could share what could've gone wrong and how did it get addressed/fixed finally. I guess one of the factors being the IP address set to what it actually resolved to. The one I've used {31, 170, 160, 99} was given to me by the hosting provider.
Appreciate all the help and persistence all through till it worked.
Thanks and regards.
Here is the output at my end
connecting...
connected
Sent the http request
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2012 16:14:42 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.17
Content-Length: 193
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
A sample string as test message