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.

Here’s an experiment to see gauge how many people I can reach with this blog. Below is a coupon code for taking $5 off the purchase price of FileChute:

SUNNYVALE

The coupon is valid for today only. Please feel free to share it with your friends.

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”.

With well over 10,000 customers, hardly a day goes by now when we don’t get a request to retrieve lost serial number. I have just added a support page with self-served serial number retrieval. Hopefully this will reduce our support load a little bit. More importantly, users who lost their serial numbers can now get their serials immediately instead of having to wait for an email.

A Mac user wrote to say he visited our website but couldn’t download anything. Nothing happened when he clicked on the download links. Later that same day, I got another email from him saying he had solved the problem. It turned out JavaScript on his browser was disabled.

A few months back, I introduced the use of JavaScript for our download links. Long story short, this was part of my effort to add Google AdWords conversion tracking. Due to my oversight, browsers with JavaScript disabled hadn’t been able to download software from our website for the last few months!

After some googling, I found this very elegant solution. All I had to do was change all occurrences of anchor tags that looked like this:

     <a href="javascript:download('EC')">

to this:

     <a href="/download/EasyCrop.dmg"
           onClick="javascript:download('EC');return false">

When JavaScript is unavailable, the second tag behaves just like a regular tag to a static file. With JavaScript enabled, the second tag behaves just like the first one. The “return false” ensures that the href link isn’t followed after executing the script.

Of the many new features in iTunes 7, one stands out for me. iTunes is now able to fetch missing CD cover arts for you … free.

This is one feature I didn’t think Apple would put in. Think about it, the Get Album Art feature essentially eliminates an incentive for buying from iTunes Music Store over buying the CD and ripping it. Fortunately for us, Apple thinks in the long term and is making the best even better.

As a user, I love this new feature. As the author of SizzlingKeys, I’m glad I have been putting off the addition of such a feature in SizzlingKeys! That effort would have gone straight down the drain had I started working on it to match some of the competition (Synergy, for instance).

http://www.apple.com/itunes/overview/

I visited Apple’s downloads page today and found SizzlingKeys and EasyFrame on their Hot Picks lists.

Here are the lists for the iPod + iTunes category and the Imaging & 3D category:

We released EasyCrop 2.1 this morning. We’ve added a much-requested feature: sharpening!

A checkbox and slider for sharpening now appears just below the scale slider.

Without sharpening:

And with moderate sharpening:

Download EasyCrop now.

Help us spread the word and save 25% off EasyFrame.

Just tell a friend about EasyFrame and then apply the coupon code iTOLDaFRIEND at checkout to get your 25% discount. It’s that simple. The coupon even works in conjunction with the EasyCrop + EasyFrame combo discount (that’s another $5 off).

This offer expires on August 20, 2006.

Direct Download Links: EasyCrop / EasyFrame

Macworld editor Dan Frakes wrote a nice review of FileChute, giving it 4 mice. Ever since the article was published on their website several weeks ago, I have been anxiously waiting to see it in print.

The September 2006 issue of Macworld arrived in my mailbox today. Naturally, the first thing I did was flipped to page 36 for this month’s Gems - and there it was! This is the most mainstream press coverage we’ve had since EasyFrame was chosen as MacAddict’s Shareware Pick of the Month for February 2005. This is a very exciting time for us here at Yellow Mug!