Cookie fun

Yesterday I ran into a problem while testing where my machine wasn't getting the correct localized strings for the french language. After lots of debugging we found that the localization is dependent on a locale set in a cookie that every user is supposed to have which wasn't getting created on my machine. Looking at the code we couldn't see any reason why it wasn't working on my machine but was working on another developer's machine. After some more debugging we found that when the cookie is created it's domain is explicitly set. Since I was accessing the site from my local machine the domain I was using didn't match the domain of the cookie. So, I modified my hosts file so that localhost mapped to the same domain as the cookie, and now all the localized strings work correctly, because the cookie is created and the locale is stored in it.