If you want to clear your error in a small amount of code, do a similar hack as to what most people do in SQL query checking,
<?php
$result = mysql_query($sql) or die();
?>
It could look like this:
<?php
if (!($socket = socket_create()) {
echo ("Failed to create socket: " . socket_strerror(socket_last_error()) and socket_clear_error());
}
?>
As you can see, I use "and" here instead of "or" since the first part will always return true, thus if you use or PHP's lazy boolean checking will not execute the last part, which it will with an and if the first part is true.