You might be one of the very few lucky people out there who’s got a working installation of MacPorts running dating back to your Leopard (10.5) environment – but for the remainder of us (including everyone on the Meeho!™ team), upgrading to Snow Leopard makes MacPorts not work properly.

Here is an example of an error we got:

Error: Unable to open port: can't read "build.cmd": Failed to locate 'make' in path: '/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin' or at its MacPorts configuration time location, did you move it?

If you are experiencing compile errors of nearly any kind, having yourself cursing and swearing trying to get your darn MacPorts to work again, do not worry: practically, no matter which error(s) you might receive, the solution is for you to do a clean install of MacPorts – it worked for all of us.

To get it all right again, please follow the Migration guide on the MacPorts web site: http://trac.macports.org/wiki/Migration

Google has developed a very interesting tool based on the browser window sizes of the millions of users that visit Google every single day. The tool is named Browser Size and it enables you to ensure that the most important parts of your web page is viewable by the majority of your visitors, at least as seen through the optic of Google.

You can have a look at Browser Size at http://browsersize.googlelabs.com.

If you’re wondering why there is no Extract filter in PhotoShop CS4, you do rightfully so since it’s not a part of the base CS4 installation anymore.

However, you can download the plugin right here. All you need to do is to copy the plugin file to the Plug-ins > Filters directory of the CS4 installation, restart PhotoShop and you’re good to go!

Having copied the Extract filter to the Filters folder, "Extract..." will appear in the Filters menu once again.

We have covered this topic briefly in relation to our group mailing lists. However, I wish to use this entry to clearly emphasize a fact about using the mailto attribute. Imagine you have the following piece of HTML:

<a href="mailto:kt@meeho.dk,aj@meeho.dk">Send a mail to Kasper and Anders!</a>

The above will work, since the mailto string only consists of a total of 30 characters. However, if this length exceeds 255 characters, it won’t work in Internet Explorer 7 and if it exceeds 2048 characters, it won’t work in Firefox etc. – the browsers limit the mailto attribute at different lengths and the key point is: they limit how much data, you can put in the tag. So what to do in this case?

In case you’re looking for a solution that enables you to put a whole bunch of e-mail addresses in the mailto attribute of your <a> tag, look no further – it will not work properly on all systems no matter what you do!

Of course, if you are absolutely sure of the fact that your code will only produce a mailto length of, say, 150 characters then fine, go ahead, but otherwise you will run into trouble.

For those of you interested in the rules about the mailto attribute, the RFC about URIs defines no official maximum length. The RFC simply states that “URI producers should use names that conform to the DNS syntax, even when use of DNS is not immediately apparent, and should limit these names to no more than 255 characters in length”.

What we have done in Meeho!™ is to make use of forwarding to a bunch of e-mail addresses in Postfix. This fixes the problem, but it requires in-depth knowledge of Postfix plus, of course, that Postfix is installed and usable in your setup. If needed, we will cover this in a new blog entry.