Morpho

Tried starting Morpho on a Linux machine (a) with with IPChains blocking
connections, and (b) with IPChains not running, but with the network cable
unplugged.

When Morpho starts up, and it reaches the "Determining network status" point
(line 1461 in Morpho.java - in the startPing() method) - it takes a very long
time for the code to finally "decide" that it can't contact Metacat, and pop up
the corresponding dialog box; much longer than it does on Windows.

With the network cable unplugged, it times out in around 1 minute. With IPChains
running, it takes around 6 minutes to time out. (To the average user, who
probably wouldn't wait long enough to see what was happening, these would
probably look like a hang)

2 ideas:

1) Maybe there's a "timeout" setting for the URL.connect() method, which is
platform-specific (since it's not a problem on windows) - and maybe there's some
way of setting it to a shorter value for Linux?

2) Maybe we could kick off our own timer when we start doing the ping, and if it
doesn't return within a predetermined time, we could assume the network isn't
available?