mysql connector/net and cyrillics

im writing this application that stores client data in mysql 4.0.18 and i see that any data in cyrillics or unicode is stored as ??????.
wtf??
i search and search the web for solution and found .... nothing !?!?
i remembered i had a similar problem once with software for another client, and at that time a had given up and used MySQL ODBC instead.
this time i decided to continue the search and found this post (http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=10870) and a little bit somewhere here.
so the solution is to add charset=utf8 to your connection string.
why is it so hard to find the solution to a problem that should be common ? or, hmm, ok - maybe i really should've read the mysql manual properly...

building pwlib

i have to add 729 codec support to my application. for that i downloaded voxgratia's patched version of openh323 and pwlib and started the fight for building them.
what i kept getting was some unresolved externals, so after a long, long struggle i noticed that the compiler-encoded method string which ptlib looks for for linking in ptlibd.def differs from the string in the ptlibsd.lib which is being linked.
so i decided to replace the strings in ptlibd.def with the correct ones in ptlibsd.lib. everything compiles fine so far, i wonder if it will also work fine ....

file upload with asp.net

while playing with some basic asp.net stuff i got this

Maximum request length exceeded.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Web.HttpException: Maximum request length exceeded.

Source Error:


An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.


Stack Trace:




[HttpException (0x80004005): Maximum request length exceeded.]
System.Web.HttpRequest.GetEntireRawContent() +895
System.Web.HttpRequest.GetMultipartContent() +58
System.Web.HttpRequest.FillInFormCollection() +256
System.Web.HttpRequest.get_Form() +50
System.Web.UI.Page.GetCollectionBasedOnMethod() +70
System.Web.UI.Page.DeterminePostBackMode() +47
System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain() +42


solution was found here: simply increase HttpRuntime maxRequestLength in machine.config

But I bet you knew this already, didn't you ? :)