I am posting to Hudson server using curl from the command line using the following--
curl -X POST -d \'4142430A
The modern day solution to this is much simpler with the requests module (tagline: HTTP for humans! :)
import requests
r = requests.post('http://httpbin.org/post', data = {'key':'value'}, auth=('user', 'passwd'))
r.text # response as a string
r.content # response as a byte string
# gzip and deflate transfer-encodings automatically decoded
r.json() # return python object from json! this is what you probably want!