All I want for Christmas

Attn: Request Department, Geek specialist
House of Santa Claus
North Pole

As I could not find a reputable looking web site to post my request, I'm just putting this stuff on my blog and assuming your Google alert for me will notify the right people.

Thanks for all the great stuff you got me last Christmas. Like, a new job, this blog, the chance to meet that guy from the New Zealand Supercomputing Centre, and an entertaining and thought-provoking rant in the form of The Kingdom of Nouns. It wasn't what I asked for, except for the job, but I liked it all anyway. Even the Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster 64MB promotional USB memory key that was so cheap and ubiquitous I got two at different events.

For Christmas 2006, I'd like an assortment from the following wishes:

1. A better mental model of the web browser/web server interaction. The one I've got now is pretty rusty and broken down. I mean, how am I supposed to think about the back button in the presence of an AJAX interface? What's the right way to view multiple user browsers pointed to the same web site, as far as sharing or not sharing cookies and sessions?


2. An elegant solution to the Tower of Babel situation regarding data representation


3. Tab completion built in to more widgets that I use on a regular basis.


4. Better Ant documentation


5. Better techniques for isolating code in Java. Onejar is a pretty good start.


6. Time to catch up on Java. I'm still stuck on 1.4.2, and now they've announced 1.6.


7. Time to play with Ruby.

I don't know how you're going to package the "time" requests, but try to do better than giving me insomnia or something.