PC timer for online tests, howto

I needed a timer to take online tests with (on an IBM PC).

And I found PC Timer. It seems ideal for this purpose:

http://www.brothersoft.com/the-pc-timer-1862.html

In order to alert me when a timed test is nearly over, I configured it to run this simple batch file:

@echo off
mode con: cols=100 lines=8
color 4e
echo .
echo .
echo "Time's up"
echo .
echo .
pause

Simple!

Presumably, it will be useful in timing other things, as well.

Beyond the timer, it also has two alarms (for moments, rather than durations, as of version 4.0).

Copyright (c) 2012 Mark D. Blackwell.

Offline Rdoc generation, howto

Recently, I wanted to work with a Ruby gem called 'devise'.

Like many people installing gems, usually I don't include their Rdoc because of the time it takes.

My Internet connection happened to be down, so for my already installed gem devise, I wanted to generate its Ruby documentation (Rdoc) offline. The documented command for this unfortunately wanted to generate the Rdoc for all my gems:
rdoc {gem-name}

This happened with these versions:
ruby 1.9.2-p290
rubygems 1.8.10
rdoc 3.12

I found this workaround to generate a single gem's Rdocs:
cd ~/.rvm/gems/{ruby-version}/gems/{gem-name}-{version}
rdoc .
mv doc/* ~/.rvm/gems/{ruby-version}/doc/{gem-name}-{version}/rdoc
cd ~
gem server
# In SeaMonkey:
open localhost:8808
click {gem-name}
click 'rdoc'

Copyright (c) 2012 Mark D. Blackwell.