Oh how I hate ubuntu... I guess it broke after I updated some packages. Will fix it in a bit.

As far as making the explorer faster goes, well... It's not an easy task as the Abe block exporer source code is a nightmare performance-wise. There's no proper caching, everything is recalculated from raw data on every single page load. Adding caching proved fairly difficult as the code is just not modular enough, so I kinda gave up.