Invited by Google to attend their compiler summit 2014 in Munich

I should have told this before but did not have time to post.  Anyway, I consider this as a second milestone of my PhD.  Thanks to Tobias for sending me the reference email that Google Munich is asking PhD students from Europe to apply to attend the Compiler Summit in Munich in December.  I applied and to my utmost joy, got an invitation from Google to attend this.

This is an ALL EXPENSES PAID trip and also by Google, a company I have been dreaming to be a part of since my coming abroad.  Who can tell, this can be the beginning of a long collaboration with them?

Also, the cool thing is the summit ends on 10th Dec and on the day of 11th, they are arranging a trip in Munich (which is my Birthday).  What more can be better as a birthday present?

GRUB Problem Ubuntu Windows 8.1 Dual Installation

It's been a really LONG time since I have written a blog.  It's not because I did not have anything to write about.  Trust me, I have many more things than ever  to write about in the blog.  But I was so lazy to post.  I will probably add one of them as that is related to my PhD progress and many people might be interested in it.

Anyway, today morning I ran into this problem.  In my Dell laptop (which my supervisor gave me), I had dual booted Ubuntu and Windows 8 (native OS) perfectly fine.  Yesterday I had to boot into windows (which I normally do once in 6 months, but now I am taking a machine learning course and therefore had to install (and use) MATLAB in windows.  Because I did not trust the version I installed in Ubuntu that much.

Anyway, yesterday I received a free upgrade offer from Windows to upgrade to 8.1  I recently bought a laptop for my mom (in my glorious US trip, which I should have mentioned in blogs given that it was one of the most memorable trips of my life) which had windows 8.1 installed and I kind of liked it.  The upgrade ran for hours and I did not check yesterday what is the state of my laptop after the upgrade.

But when I came to my office today in the morning, I discovered that the boot menu has been corrupted and I was not getting the option for booting into Ubuntu.  The laptop was directly booting into Windows 8.1  For a moment, I got a chill because a LOT of my research materials have not been backed up and they reside in the Ubuntu partition.

A quick search through Google revealed that this is a common problem after the upgrade to the Windows 8.1 and the problem can be fixed.  But there was infinitely many solutions to choose from and trying every one of them can easily ruin your whole day.

Therefore I'm gonna talk about the solution that worked for me.

1.  Disable the fast startup feature of Windows 8.1 as described here.
2.  Restart with the advanced startup option as described here (until Step 5), this is necessary to boot into Ubuntu to your modified firmware (which hopefully is not broken).
3.  Select the Ubuntu option once you see the UEFI boot list.
4.  This should take you into Ubuntu.
5.  Run sudo update-grub from Ubuntu terminal.
6.  Voila, its fixed :-)

This was really easy and saved a lot of time for me.  Hopefully it will help someone who is facing the same problem.