You may have already tried this, but just in case…
An easier way to test is using i2c-tools mentioned in some earlier post here. You can then run commands directly from command line to send data to or read from the IC. You can first check if the device’s address shows up in the probe command (i2cdetect -r 2 on a beagleboard shows up devices connected on I2C-2)See here for more details - http://elinux.org/Interfacing_with_I2C_Devices#i2c-tools