Interesting (and surprisingly quiet) thread. I'm curious to try playing with NEC IR codes, but don't know how to read the codes coming out of my remotes. I can see the NEC-looking pulses on a 'scope, but I don't have an application to read them conveniently.
Did you ever write a matching Arduino program to dump NEC command messages to the serial port? Or is there some software tool (hopefully compatible with OSX or Linux) that can do this? With no way to read codes, there's no way to really try writing them...