OSC tutorial?

new to supercollider -

I'm about halfway through the music examples with supercollider, and as I'm on unix, I don't have the option of making guis with sc itself.

I'm working with the Net::OpenSoundControl module in Perl.
I'm trying to connect to the SC Server and send messages, but I'm not getting any confirmation from either end.

1) Does the scserver print to the std out when it has recieved a connection request?
2) Does it barf and tell you there's an error when you send a malformed request?
3) What is the proper format to send messages in?

Looking through the mail logs her and looking through the tutorials on sourceforge didn't really seem to give a clear picture as to what was going on. Does anyone have any suggestions or thoughts as to how I can get started and make sure I'm getting the proper feedback from the server?

thanks!
John