At the risk of losing some of my geek cred, I must admit that I’m not a big gamer. I love to code and, well, there’s just not enough hours in the day. Still, I couldn’t help but get excited about the possibility of a sleek, small, open-sourced gaming console that runs on Android when I saw OUYA on Kickstarter. My pre-retail OUYA arrived on Friday, just in time for a weekend of testing.

A Console For The People

Starting at $99 for the system and one controller, OUYA promised many things:
- Open Source
- Sleek, user-guided console and controller design
- Lots of games
- Developer support
- Change the gaming industry

Before my console arrived, some of the delivery was obvious. The OUYA team dedicated time to answering questions and working on valuable partnerships. Additionally, the controller design was guided, in part, by suggestions from the community. While the console was being built, OUYA held a contest in which developers submitted game prototypes and the community voted on their favorites. Though they were just prototypes, my review of the submitted games was the first time by excitement for this new console ebbed. Most of the games were not console-worthy and only a few stood out as ones I thought showed some promise. I reminded myself that these were prototypes from indie developers who had a short time frame to develop in and bottled up some of my apprehension.

As a funder in the Kickstarter campaign, one of the perks was getting the console before it hits store shelves in June. The closer June got, the more I wondered if it would ever arrive. Of course, I was in the last batch to be shipped, but it eventually turned up on my doorstep.

Unboxing And Setup

The unboxing of my OUYA has been bitter-sweet. The recipe for the worlds first open source gaming console seems to consist of excitement, anticipation, caution, a bit of doubt, disappointment, and frustration. Below is the unboxing video which includes some game play.

After getting everything out of the box, I headed for the setup instructions. A few simple instructions covered the basic – and I mean BASIC – setup: Plug things in, turn on, follow on-screen instructions. Great. Easy peezy, I thought, but then I looked at the controller. I had two AA batteries per controller, but no obvious battery panel, no screws to unscrew, and mostly no instructions. I took a chance and lightly tried to pry the top cover off of a controller. Sure enough, the left side popped off and there was a battery slot – for one battery. A quick check revealed the right side hiding a battery compartment as well. Where everything else was designed to be so simple and intuitive, I wondered by the battery installation had to be a puzzle.

Once I had everything plugged in and booted up, getting connected to the internet was just awful. The first time I tried, it connected and even downloaded updates. Then it immediately dropped my wireless connection. After several attempts to reconnect, I looked to the support site for help where I found that many others were experiencing the same connection problems. After trying suggestions to remove the case, factory reset, reboot my router, etc., I finally gave in and dragged a monitor and my OUYA upstairs to the wireless router and plugged it directly in. With just a little more prodding, the wireless magically started working again and has been fine throughout the house. Waiting months to play with this thing only to have to battle another hour or two to get it to work is certainly not ideal.

Features And Game Play

Let’s talk a little more about the features. For starters, this is a $99 console. I think the last time I spent this little on a console was when I got my Nintendo. More diminutive than the price is the console, itself. OUYA stands at 3x3x3 inches and packs in a Tegra3 quad-core processor, 1 GB of RAM, 8GB of internal flash storage, ethernet and wifi 802.11 b/g/n, and Bluetooth LE 4.0. It connects to your TV via HDMI with up to 1080p support, and also has a USB 2.0 and micro-USB port (for development). The controller is wireless and includes the familiar four surface buttons, two analog sticks, one d-pad, and two left and two right trigger buttons. At the top center of the controller is a touch pad to control an on-screen cursor.

Game play feels good and the controller is comfortable. The OUYA console is equipped with an internal fan but can still warm up some when in use. OUYA carries about 135 games, but I’ve only tried a handful based on what was featured or a “Staff Pick”. If the four games I’ve spent time with thus far, Final Fantasy III was my least favorite. After all the bragging about bringing a recognized title to this console, the game left me bored. Conversely, Chrono Blade – whose developers can also brag about their work on Grand Theft Auto – has been a non-stop action game with smooth play and combo moves that take me back to the first time I played Street Fighter. Honorable mentions go out to Beast Boxing Turbo and Flashout 3D for providing engaging game play and notable quality.

While I’m on the topic of quality, even Chrono Blade’s graphics – while the most impressive I saw on OUYA – couldn’t stop me from wondering if this $99 console will ever show signs of the level of graphics found on an XBOX 360 or PS3. While open source means virtually no barrier to entry for developers, it also means that most of the games currently available lack the production quality found in other consoles. Hopefully time will cure this. In the meantime, the silver lining to this cloud is that OUYA embraces share-ware style gaming. You can download any game (or a demo in some cases) and if you like it, you can buy it right from your system. If you don’t like it, simply delete it and try the next one. While other consoles offer an option to get games online, OUYA’s games are all online.

Open Source And The ODK

The OUYA runs on Android, which makes it easy to fulfill one of its key goals, to be open source. Typically, a game developer would need to spend five or six figures to develop for a Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo console. The cost to get started developing an OUYA game is $0. This is a double-edged sword for developers. On one hand, it means a ton of games and no walls keeping creative new developers out. On the other hand, there will be a lot of junk games to sift through to find the good ones.

I’m no game developer, but I have been wanting to take a stab at some Android development. Even though OUYA is designed as a game console, it has the potential for a lot more with the ability to create all forms of apps for it. Sadly, I’ll have to wait until OUYA fixes their ODK (OUYA Developer Kit) link so I can download it.

Early Conclusions

It’s still a bit early to be sure, but I think OUYA has a promising future, providing they can work out the kinks. The wireless connection problems were especially concerning. I

So you want to build a data driven web site but don’t know what database to use? Maybe it’s an IOS or Android application and not a website at all. Either way, if you collect data, you’re going to want to determine the best way to store it for later. In this article, I’ll talk about what a database is, how to choose the right one, and what comes next.

What Is A Database?

By definition, a database (also commonly referred to as “DB”) is a collection of organized data. For example, if you have written down a list of all the CDs you have in your music collection, a database to represent that might include a table for artists and a table for albums and you could even link them together. This organization of data gives us the ability to work with data in just about every way imaginable, which is so much better than just a list. Examples of this can be seen right here on JoeTech.com. Articles on the main page of the site are shown newest first by sorting the article data, the search option at the top brings back specific articles by using MySQL searching and indexing tools, and your comment on this article gets stored in a comments table so that it can be retrieved later. There’s a lot to know about how databases work, but let’s start with some basics.

Types Of Databases

New databases (like MapD) pop up all the time, and it would be impossible to cover them all. In an effort to keep things simple, I’ll stick to some of the more popular DBs in use.

Some common object oriented databases that have been around for quite a while include MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, Oracle. Each database system has its own features and flaws. Oracle is well known for its enterprise stability and support while SQLite is fast, free, and well adapted to smaller data sets. MySQL and Microsoft SQL are extremely popular for use with PHP or ASP/.NET applications, respectively.

In what sounds like competition for the traditional database systems, NoSQL databases have emerged in recent years and have grown quickly in popularity. Known for their ability to easily scale horizontally and store a lot of simple data (like Tweets), NoSQL databases often compromise by lacking a lot of functionality like normalizing across a large number of tables. Some popular NoSQL DBs include MongoDB, memcached, Redis, and CouchDB and can often be easier to get started with due to their simplicity.

A third category of databases that is coming into the light but not a highly used is NewSQL. This category includes new DB technologies that allow for highly scalable databases without the loss of critical functionality for broad data sets. These are perhaps not as critical when you’re starting out, so I won’t go into further detail.

How To Choose The Right Database

Choosing the right database can be paramount to the success of your project and the larger the project, the more important your choice will be. With so many choices, how do you pick the right one?

Before anything else, you need to know your goal. What kind of data – and how much of it – do you expect to store? One thing I look at is how many tables I plan on storing. If it’s just a few, I might default to a NoSQL solution, but if it’s a bunch, I’ll look to a traditional object-oriented DB.

After narrowing down the category of database to use, you’ll need to pick the best one for the job, your budget, etc. If you plan to house your site on a Windows server and program it in .NET, MS SQL is probably a good bet. If you want free and need to have everything on a Linux server with your code in PHP, MySQL is often the way to go. When the client (or your company) demands support contracts and has a budget to deplete, Oracle could be a contender. Look at the specific features and pitfalls of each database before making a decision.

What Comes Next?

Knowing the right database to use is only the beginning. Depending on your hosting environment, you may need to take steps to get the database software installed and then you should:

- Think through all the data you plan to store – every little detail
- Design a database schema – more on schemas in Part 2
- Normalize, index, and otherwise optimize your database – Part 3?
- Connect to your database from your site’s code
- Secure against hacking and injections

As you can see, there’s a lot to consider when it comes to storing data for your website or application, but if you take it one step at a time, it’s not so bad. Stay tuned for additional pieces to the database puzzle.

Look around you… I mean online. Everything you see is powered by some form of web technology. Every day, you interface, indirectly, with MySQL databases, PHP code, and HTML that makes it all show up. Almost everything you touch on the web could be created by you, too, with some time and the right education. Last week, I talked about a slew of places to learn online for free and I know a lot of you are interested in how webpages are created, what programming languages exist, and the technology that drives the web. If you’re worries about where to start or things being too technical, don’t worry. My goal is to introduce more of this kind of information on this blog and help others learn what I know.

So what does all this mean? It means I’m planning to bring you much of my regular content (reviews, guest articles, etc.) as well as new content that explains how stuff works in plain language so everyone can follow along. But first, I need to know what you want to want to learn more about. You can suggest anything, but here’s a list of example topics to get you started:

- Basic HTML
- Glossary of web terms
- How to series (create a web page, set up a form, accept payments online)
- Beginners PHP
- Working with frameworks
- Software for programmers
- How the web works
- What’s a 404 or 403?

Choose from a topic above or offer up your own idea. Give me your request in a comment below and I’ll do my best to accommodate. In addition, loyal viewers may have noticed something new on the right side of the page recently. While in Vegas last January, I met up with a company called Wizpert who connects experts with people who need help. If you ever have a programming or technology question, click the little orange “W” on the right to connect with me on Skype. I’m here to help.