This morning I woke up with this song in my head. It reminds me quite a bit of the Rolling Stones, and it’s very appropriate for the mood I’m in today.

I’m sitting here at Canonical’s office in Montreal, where we are having another Landscape sprint. There’s a couple things that make this sprint special, one of them being that Frank Wierzbicki has joined us! Welcome to the team, Frank, and I hope you enjoy!

It has also coincided with the end of our 1.5.5 milestone, which rolled out yesterday, with some interesting highlights:

Speed!

Contrary to what other people might tell you, YES speed does matter. We’ve been slowly (ha!) rolling out improvements to page load speed, and I’m happy to say that the improvements are very noticeable. Things we’ve done to improve this range from setting proper caching headers for static resources to heavily abusing the YUI Loader. I should write more about that on a more appropriate occasion. There’s always things to improve on, so keep an eye on it!

Faster Trials

Over the last four years, the trial registration for Landscape hasn’t been… enjoyable to say the least. This week we’ve finally rolled out the first iteration of our simplified registration process, which removes a manual approval step which used to take several weeks to be done. That means you can now register for a trial account in Landscape and start using it right away! Quite a novel concept, isn’t it? :) We’ll planning some more updates to it, so that when starting the registration process you have a better sense of where you are in the process and what are steps involved.

We have more exciting updates coming up before the end of the year, so keep an eye on it. But in the meantime, hit that ‘Registration’ link in Landscape, get it like you like it, and enjoy!