Parameter support in rosserial?

edit

I'm developing a rosserial node for reading some sensor values, and I was hoping to pull in a few parameters. There seems to be support in the code, and there's an old documentation page here (which isn't actually linked-to from the main documentation). This is my code:

void setup()
{
  nh.initNode();
  nh.advertise(pub);

  while(!nh.connected()) {
    nh.spinOnce();
  }

  nh.getParam("devices", device_counts, 3);
  nh.getParam("rate", &rate);
}

I consistently get Tried to publish before configured, topic id 6, which is the parameter-fetch magic topic. I'm using Electric on an Oneiric system, with the rosserial debs. (I'm aware that I haven't got default values in here; I've removed those blocks, for simplicity of presentation.)

Is parameter server support incomplete in rosserial?