Alopi Devi

I had a chance to visit a small temple 'Alopi Devi Mandir' near Sangam at Allahabad. Surprisingly this temple does not have an idol; else a small wooden carriage is worshipped. I got curious & asked some localities about it.

According to legends this place was a huge forest years back & was a den for bands of dreaded robbers. Although being of criminal mentalities, they worshipped some form of the goddess Kali to protect them from the forces of nature. Their targets usually were rich zamindars' returning after tax collection from villages under their surveillance and marriage processions. It so happened once that during one such marriage procession of the daughter of a rich & respectable ruler of some native princely state (I couldn't remember the names), these robbers attacked the group, killed all the men and stole the gold and other riches. Then their eyes fell on the 'Palki' (Palanquin) - the carriage; but to their bewilderment the bride seemed to have vanished. They believed that the goddess had shown them her power through this amazing way of protecting the young girl by making her vanish (in sanskrit alopi means vanished). Before any curse befalls them they switched careers :). They took the the 'Palki' to their den and started worshipping the carriage as their goddess. Years after some zamindar built a temple around it & that is what stands today.

Some people as well as some Internet links however give different opinions. After the death of goddess Sati, her husband Lord Shiva had turned a little cranky due to grief and carried her body on his shoulders. To relieve him from his agony, Lord Vishnu used his 'Chakra' on the dead body of goddess Sati resulting in various body parts dropping at various points on the earth. It is believed that the last part dropped near this place thus resulting in 'Alop' (vanishing).

Although I am very much spiritual in my own way, I am hardly religious; I don't mind doubting Hindu religious mythology. To me the second opinion however fails to explain why a 'Palki' or carriage is worshipped. Hence the 1st legend sounds much more plausible and more down to earth ! Besides it reminds me of the stories I used to enjoy during my childhood days, especially Bankim Chandra's 'Devi Chaudhurani'.

Matlab & Compiz incompatibility

I was using Matlab 2009 without any problems when one fine day I decide to enable Compiz on my laptop. I find that the graphics from Matlab suddenly turned haywire. I found this solution:

In /usr/local/matlab09/toolbox/local/hgrc.m replace the line

monitors = get(0, 'MonitorPositions');
with
monitors = [0,0,1280,800;1281,801,1280,800];

The original post can be found here.

Jaunty Jackalope on Dell Studio 15

I recently bought a Dell Studio 15 laptop. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) on it. I faced a few problems which my friend Saugata aka Jones and myself resolved one by one.
Initially the problem was with the bluetooth mouse: using this link this problem was resolved.
Next, the problem with sound; The path to success lay in installing and running gnome-alsamixer.

sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixer

and edit the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf to add to the end:

options snd-hda-intel model=dell-m6

So, anyone interested in a Dell Studio 15 (or 17) with the recent versions of Ubuntu should see this site. Unfortunately the original site is in French; so some of the translations could be misleading. For example the 4th column for 'At a glance' table should be read as 'Sound' which runs with Jaunty only after some manipulations.

I still have a problem which has not been resloved; there is a very sharp beep when I logout. It is irritating & sometimes with earphones it can be really a pain in the ears !