i broke down and actually read the book about I/O Kit hacking which the other docs said i should have been familiar with. i don't know what i was thinking by reading them without being familiar with the other book. anyway, that explained how drivers worked that i could begin to understand how this ether of confusion fits together.
so much so, that i got to delete the 300+ loc that i copy-n-pasted last night for so many hours, and copy-n-pasted some different code back in. now, i get a /dev/tty.pocketpc0 device when i turn on my ipaq. this one, however, was made by the mysterious IOBSDSerialSomething object which means i have less code that was typed in wrong. all in all, i am at the same point as when i went to bed yesterday, except that i am doing it right this time. this is a welcome change, since yesterday i knew i was doing it wrong. so tomorrow i have to finish some things i was too lazy to implement, and to actully hook up the device in /dev to the ipaq. and then it's GO TIME.
i went to the store, and finally got a stupid stop-n-shop dingus card. i saved a whopping 20% or so as they were selling cookies at 33% off with the card. phil doesn't think wiping them out of cookies is worth his time, though, but something tells me i should go back and stock up tomorrow. [ ed: i will definitely be going to the store, as i forgot to get contact solution ]
"our" TiVo2 would have arrived today, if i had been awake to sign for it. that means i have to get up to wait for them to come again - between 10:30 and 2 - which i had feared would be impossible considering i woke up at 2 today, and wouldn't be able to fall asleep again until 6. i think i will be able to fall asleep now though.