Last night we attended Star Wars in Concert here in Vancouver. It was most excellent! There were a few people dressed in costume (not me or Eileen though) and the general atmosphere was energetic, sort of like seeing the original movie in the theatre many, many years ago. I originally thought the event would be showing the entire first movie, but later learned it was a composite of many clips from all six films.

I have no idea how it worked out so well but through the miracle of online ticket purchasing combined with some amazing luck we scored front row seats on the floor, right in front of the stage. If I’d wanted to, I could have jumped out of my seat and easily leapt on stage. I could have tackled C3PO (Anthony Daniels) if I’d wanted to. Fortunately I resisted this urge and therefore am not writing this from jail.

The event itself was really great, the music was wonderful and we were close enough to watch the individual performances of each member of the orchestra. The only somewhat disappointing part of the evening was having to sit through so many clips from the most recent movies (episodes 1, 2, 3). It really is painful to watch the stilted dialogue and terrible acting. There were plenty of scenes from the “good” films too, especially lots from episode 4.

Of course the famous cantina scene played, with the live orchestra giving a great performance. Even though the film clip was from the 1997 redone version, we all knew Han shot first.

Eileen and I went to the Canucks seat selection session last night to pick new seats for next season. The new season won’t start until October but we are still looking forward to it!

The seat selection process is both thrilling and depressing – GM Place has something like 18,800 seats for each game (sold out every night) and yet there are really only a handful of seats available when we get the opportunity to pick. We could have kept our same seats from last year, but we were looking for something a little better: less behind the goalie and more around the side towards the blue line. We also were interested to get closer to the front row.

We lucked out this year, there were a few seats that met our “upgrade” requirements: about half-way between the goal line and the blue line, and row 3. The picture here shows the view of the defensive zone net from our seat. Nice!

Its going to be a long summer waiting for the season to start!

The Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup tonight, marking the end of another hockey season. I’m disappointed the series didn’t go the full seven games, but I think the team with more skill won. The Flyers gave it the good fight but in the end they couldn’t put up enough of a fight to delay the eventual outcome. The ‘hawks didn’t have great goal tending, but they did have a pretty good top line and a really deep pool of talent and toughness to draw upon. And despite having Marion Hossa (the unlucky charm for teams of the last two years) they managed to pull out a convincing win. It will be interesting to see if this team is a one-time-only winner (like the Lightening, the Hurricanes, the Ducks) or if they can continue to be a dominant force like the Penguins and Wings have been.

Already looking forward to next season where we will be cheering for the Canucks again.

Eileen and I were at our friend Melissa’a home for dinner recently (it was an excellent meal as you’d expect) and she was telling us about this amazing bleu cheese soufflé from Ina Garten’s cookbook Barefoot in Paris. Melissa had made it once before and raved about it. Leafing through the book made my mouth water, everything looked delicious and also practical to make.

We stopped into the local bookstore and picked up a copy at the very next opportunity. There are a quite a few good recipes in this book. We’ve made the fennel salad and rosemary cashews, both are easy and excellent. Eileen really wanted to try the soufflé but I’d never made a soufflé before, and always heard it was really tricky. Certainly there are plenty of jokes about slamming doors and banging pots causing the soufflé to fall. But I decided to give it a whirl anyways, with Eileen’s encouragement. And she said she was hungry, so it was either order something or make the soufflé.

It turned out extremely well. I’ll definitely make it again. Eileen thought of making this as a side to a roast lamb dish, so I’ll have to find an excuse for a dinner party and make it!

I’ve had a long interest in using Controller Area Network (CAN) to communicate between different components such as sensors or GPS modules or motor controllers. I wasn’t sure if I could do this with the Gumstix Overo board, but I got excited when I found out that Linux kernel version 2.6.33 would be including a driver for the Microchip MCP2515 CAN chip.

This required creating a custom image for the Overo, which meant setting up a build with OpenEmbedded. The Gumstix guys made it sound pretty easy in their instructions, so I set off to make it happen. I started with a virtual machine with Ubuntu 9.10 and set up bitbake and OpenEmbedded as suggested.

I’ve uploaded a tarball of my user.collection directory with overrides for the Overo machine configuration (you could probably ignore that) and for the Linux 2.6.33 recipe to include my configuration and patches to the Overo’s board initialization code for the MCP2515 chip on SPI bus 1 chip select 0.

My working environment for the org.openembedded.dev component uses change d535da0dfe20e965adb49d3acf720e7f9feb58c6. I’m sure by the time you try this there will be newer versions, but I can’t say whether my patches will work or not.

As for the hardware, the Overo uses 1.8v internally but the MCP2515 uses 5v. I used a few SparkFun logic level converter boards to translate voltages. Despite what you might read on their website, DO NOT USE the RX channels as this will send 2.5v into the 1.8v-capable pins on the Overo! Only use the TX channels (they are bidirectional and work at the correct voltage). I needed to translate five pins (SCLK, MISO, MISO, CS, and an interrupt pin) so I used three of the SparkFun boards.

I was able to use the candump program from the socket-can test tools suite to verify correct operation. Awesome!