A little while ago Andrew Powell of Universal Mind released the Chuck Norris Fact Web Service. This is a critical feature that has been missing from the Internet for some time. Frankly, I do not know how we have survived without the wisdom of Chuck Norris.
I whipped up a quick AIR application that you can run on your desktop. Every 5 seconds it will load a new pearl of wisdom from the man we know as Chuck. Please note that I'm way rusty with Adobe AIR. I haven't had the chance to play with it much lately, but dang it - I love that I was able to write this up in like 5 minutes. I spent more time making some dumb mistakes in Spry then I did on the "AIR-ness" of it. Enjoy. (As I still haven't updated IIS to let .air files worked, I renamed to a .zip.)
The entire code (minus Spry libraries) is below:
<html>
<head>
<script type="text/javascript" src="AIRAliases.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="spryjs/xpath.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="spryjs/SpryData.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var myurl = "http://www.infoaccelerator.net/chuckFacts/FactService.cfc?method=getCurrentFact&returnformat=plain";
function callHandler(req){
var result = req.xhRequest.responseText;
var sp = Spry.$("wisdom");
sp.innerText = result;
}
function getWisdom(){
Spry.Utils.loadURL("GET", myurl, true, callHandler);
}
function doLoad(){
getWisdom();
setInterval(getWisdom, 5000);
}
</script>
<style>
.wisdom {
font-family: times;
font-style: italic;
}
</style>
</head>
<body onload="doLoad();">
<h3>The Wisdom of Chuck Norris</h3>
<span id="wisdom" class="wisdom"></span>
</body>
</html>