kevinweil/elephant-bird — pull request #325 by isnotinvain (2013-06-19 00:04:42+00:00)
Title: Use base64 to encode strings that have unicode

Turns out that hadoop's Configuration object is serailzed using the system default encoding, so putting unicode in a Configuration doesn't work if the client's default charset isn't UTF-8.

So I'm using base64 instead .