I recently received several reports that SizzlingKeys stopped working after upgrading iTunes to 7.1. After some researching and testing, I’m now pretty sure the problem is caused by QuickTime 7.1.5 and not by iTunes. And the problem affects Mac OS X 10.3.9 only. Everything works fine on OS X 10.4.9 Tiger.

The problem seems to be that QuickTime is calling a missing symbol (_JVTDecoOpen). SizzlingKeys is not the only victim. Several other apps, including TurboTax, VLC and WoW (World of Warcraft), are affected by this.

I hope to find a workaround soon. In the meantime, if you’re running SizzlingKeys on Panther with an older version of QuickTime, do not upgrade to QT 7.1.5 just yet.

A few days back, I blogged about the clock on my virtual Linux box running faster than normal. Even though the fix works, there is another problem. When I resume the virtual machine after letting Parallels Desktop suspend it, the clock continues from the time the virtual machine was suspended.

Someone probably has a better way to do it, but here’s what I do. From my OS X shell, I run:

ssh root@linuxbox date `date +%m%d%H%M.%S`

This sets the clock on the VM to what’s on OS X.

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Parallels Desktop is great, but I noticed a strange problem yesterday. The clock on my virtual Linux box was advancing a lot faster than realtime. This causes a host of weird problems like the compiler warning me that some of my source files were modified in the future. Another symptom was the wacky Idle Time shown in ‘top’.

After some googling, I found this page. Basically, the solution involves adding one line to the configuration of your boot loader (e.g. grub or lilo) - “clock=pit”. Visit the above page for detailed explanation or google “parallels clock=pit”.