title: Python unicode: why in one machine works but in another one it failed sometimes?
body: <p>I found unicode in python really troublesome, why not Python use utf-8 for all the strings? I am in China so I have to use some Chinese string that can't represent by ascii, I use <code>u''</code> to denote a string, it works well in my ubuntu machine, but in another ubuntu machine (VPS provided by linode.com), it fails some times. The error is:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec
    can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 0:
    ordinal not in range(128)</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>The code I am using is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>self.talk(user.record["fullname"] + u"准备好了")
  </code></pre>