Unfortunately, the processing script hasn't helped Max for me - I'm still getting an "error: serial: error reading from serial buffer" message.

Despite the error message, the serial object continues to work (as it has done all along) on my powerbook. Weird.

hrm. well let's try and test other machines in the lab, and see if this terminal script helps those machines. at the very least, we can now use processing to gain serial data and spit it into a textfile that max can read.