Garbled Fred
Yesterday, I registered with LinkedIn and sent out a few invitations to people I know who also have an account.
Sadly enough, LinkedIn didn’t like my name, Frédéric, quite as much as I do, so the invitation emails ended up being signed like this:
I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.
-Frédéric
I reported the bug and hope they fix it soon. For now, I replaced my “é”s by regular “e”s but of course they are only half as nice 
Sorry for the inconvenience to everyone who though “who the heck is that?” when receiving my email.
(Thanks to Brandon and morgamic who told me about the problem.)
If you thought that was bad then I’ve seen î în the HTML source of an emaîl, can you belîeve ît?
Ã…Å•Ä• Å·ÅÂů şüŗë
Well, had it been in an HTML email, I wouldn’t quite have minded — sadly enough the entities were sent plain. With two of them in one first name, it gets slightly unreadable
At least the entity’s hex value has an “e” in it. If you automatically skip the other characters like I did, it almost makes sense!
PS. http://cert.startcom.org/
Posting from IE because minefield dislikes your self-signed certificate, and adding exceptions is a pain
Ah, thanks for the link! I should change my certificate.
The one I have is not self-signed but signed (and certified) by CACert, but since their root CA hasn’t made it into browsers yet, that doesn’t help much I guess
Hm, actually I can’t quite use it right away now because the TLS servername extension is not supported in lighttpd yet — guess I will have to play with gnutls on Apache for that, but I read that for some people this resulted in severe load spikes.
I have several domains on a single IP and a few of them require SSL (for encryption, not identification purposes).
that’s what you get for spelling your name with non-freedom characters.
Well, very typical for the average English-language site. If only they would pay just a tiny itsy bit of attention to internationalisation, or you know, just doing the right thing and use UTF-8. It’s not that hard.
Zach, non-freedom characters? What exactly is ‘free’ about being artifically restricted from using the characters that you’re supposed to use?
Laurens, I agree, using UTF-8 would have probably avoided that but maybe it’s also just a case of Javascript insertion attack “fix” gone wrong.
Regarding Zach, don’t mind him — he’s a friend of mine and this is how he becomes when he’s deprived from freedom fries too long.
Oops, this blog turned my entities into the actual characters… I meant to say that I saw î in the source… seeing î would have been an understandable charset mixup.
P.S. Thanks for turning the submit link into http, I was having trouble posting comments using the latest nightlies! (DOM Inspector to the rescue…)
Sigh. Let’s try putting the characters on separate lines:
&
#
1
9
5
;
&
#
1
7
4
;
Hehe, yeah, I switched it to http after a few problems with my SSL CA. I only wanted the admin pages to be encrypted anyway, but the Wordpress SSL plugin didn’t quite spare the public pages. :-/
Btw. I “fixed” the entities for you so they show up the way you intended.