update count API round 2

[David Bremner]

This obsoletes

     id:1419855291-31972-1-git-send-email-david at tethera.net

It got bigger when I updated the python and ruby bindings. The go
bindings are still broken by this series.

The first 4 commits are just updating the test suite so that I can
actually see the breakage in the API bindings introduced by the last
commit.