Error prompting for filename with certain locale

Whyteboard 0.41.1
Operating System: Linux 2.6.35-29-generic-pae i686
Screen Resolution: 1024x768
Python Version: 2.6.6 (r266:84292, Sep 15 2010, 15:52:39)
[GCC 4.4.5]
wxPython Version: 2.8.11.0 (gtk2-unicode)
wxPython Info: (__WXGTK__, wxGTK, unicode, gtk2, wx-assertions-off, SWIG-1.3.29)
Python Encoding: Default=ascii File=UTF-8
wxPython Encoding: utf-8
System Architecture: 32bit i686
Byte order: little
Frozen: False
#---- End System Information ----#

#---- Preferences ----#
language = Chinese

#---- Traceback Info ----#

*** Fri Jul 8 09:44:32 2011 ***
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File \"/usr/lib/whyteboard/whyteboard/gui/frame.py\", line 250, in on_save
   self.on_save_as()
 File \"/usr/lib/whyteboard/whyteboard/gui/frame.py\", line 264, in on_save_as
   _file = _file.replace(u\":\", u\"-\").replace(u\"/\", u\"-\")
UnicodeDecodeError: \'ascii\' codec can\'t decode byte 0xe5 in position 4: ordinal not in range(128)

probably the result of doing the replace on Chinese characters