Hadoop Summit and all hail screen sharing!
Presenting for the first time at Hadoop Summit was a serious thrill and this was just Day 1! Just as a refresher, Dave Mariani (@dmarini) from Klout and I got the awesome opportunity to present How Klout is changing the landscape of social media with Hadoop and BI (session info | meet the presenters). It was fun to talk about how Klout uses Flume, Scala, node.js, Hadoop/Hive, and AJAX to work together with an Analysis Services cube to gain powerful insight. Our theme:
Hadoop and BI – better together
As well, it was great to meet so many of the Hadoop folks that I typically tweet with but very rarely get to chat face-to-face – special shout out to Milind Bhandarkar (@techmilind) and Arun C. Murthy (@acmurthy).
Nevertheless, the real purpose of today’s post is just a quick call out that how me being an Apple fan-boy saved the day at Hadoop Summit. Originally, when Dave and I were going to do our presentation – we thought we’d go with an “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” theme since Klout uses all Macs and I … well, I work for Microsoft! 
Yet, due to some logistical errors, we went into our presentation room finding out that there was no VGA adapter at the podium so we couldn’t do our demos from Dave’s MacBook. The only VGA adapter that was available was in the back of the room (with the sound board and other electronics). Since Dave and I had swapping demos, that meant he and I would have to run back and forth from the stage to the back of the room – fun times!
Fortunately, we remembered that you could do screensharing and voila – my Macbook Air on the podium and Dave’s Macbook Pro connected to the VGA adapter – and my MBA was controlling Dave’s MBP for the course of the presentation…and we were praying that the WiFi connection didn’t collapse!
So a quick shout out to Screen Sharing!
P.S. You can do the same tricks with a PC too – in that case, Remote Desktop, eh?!
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