Help- low level control of mouse device

[rob]

I am trying to communicate with my Synaptics touch pad.  I am using
FreeBSD which doesn't have a setup program available.  I have all of the
relevant command data, so I'm trying to make something work in Python. 
However, I am confused about how to send binary bytes to the device. 
Here is the code that I tried:

tp=open('/dev/psm0','wb+')  #open device
tp.write(`0xff`)    #reset touchpad
print tp.read()     #read ack

But I always get an error message, "OSError- Operation Not Supported". 
I'm not quite sure how to take a binary byte 0xff, and feed it into the
write() command.  It seems that `0xff` may be the problem.  How do I
accomplish this?    Thanks.

Rob.