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Archive for August, 2011

Impressive Satchmo Sites

August 29th, 2011 2 comments

I’m starting a project for a client in Satchmo and wanted to show him some sample stores produced with the technology so that he’d feel more comfortable with what it’s capable of. The following are the standouts after going through all the items on this list:

  1. blacklockjewellery.com
  2. qwertee.com
  3. livestrongfitness.com
  4. jeepcollins.com
  5. spoonnyc.com
  6. snowsportsonline.com
  7. zutano.com
  8. abodeliving.co.uk
  9. shopjoielle.com
Quick note: while scanning through these sites it became very obvious how important is for a site to have a quick response time. When I clicked some of the links on the stores that I went to the site just wouldn’t respond to my requests. It just feels a lot better when the site is snappy and ready to serve you.
Categories: Django, Satchmo Tags:

Slow connection

August 29th, 2011 No comments

So there was something peculiar with my Linux box at my office. While my network connection is reasonably fast, it would take about ten seconds sometimes for my browser to start getting information from web sites. And almost 100% of the times I tried to load twitter.com the URL would just not resolve. I did some research and thought that maybe there was something with the DNS setup that might be awry.

Apparently in Ubuntu there’s thing called “Network Manager” that makes decisions about which nameserver to connect to. While I don’t know why this happened, Network Manager did a very bad job of selecting the nameserver to connect which resulted in this issue. I first tried connecting to Google’s nameserver (didn’t realize this was an option) and had pretty great results. I believe the IP is “8.8.4.4.” Then I did some more research and learned about this FANTASTIC application that tries its very best to choose the best nameserver for your setup. It’s called “namebench” http://code.google.com/p/namebench. The smartest part of namebench is it actually looks at your browser history (if available) to get the quickest nameserver for your actual usage. After running that tool, it recommended three nameservers to connect to. So after getting the results, I did the following:
$ sudo emacs /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 198.6.1.3
nameserver 198.6.1.4
nameserver 208.77.239.139

 

And then you have to do one more thing to make sure Network Manager doesn’t override your changes the next time the machine starts up.
$ sudo chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf

If you want to edit the file again you need to undo the chattr setting like so:
$ sudo chattr -i /etc/resolv.conf

Categories: Network, Ubuntu Tags: