why am I getting some wierd character in the component name on the dashboard?

[Manjunath Rai]

[Alex Christensen]

I believe that's the symbol for components in Jira. Jira adds that symbol whenever you have the Components field on a two-dimensional issue statistics gadget.

I believe there are icons for issue types, components, versions, and priorities if you add any of those to the two-dimensional filter gadget.