Our great country has recently moved into the 20th century by providing us with tax on web.. A WORKING version of tax on web and thus a move into the 21st century is probably not to be expected before the 2050.
Now, I do realise this is quite cynical of me.. but lets be honest here.. Tomorrow will be THE peak moment & not today at merely 10.44. Today already, their junk platform (java based) is on its knees, delivering a page after 10 retries and blank error pages at the first 9 attempts.
Somebody should probably just go & restart the java service so that memory frees up again & so that I can input my tax deduction crap
But I guess we should be happy we can already TRY to do our tax forms on the web with our fancy eIDs!
*sigh*
Edit: Oh! A new page; maybe I’ll at least be able to SEE the form today!
And that on a sodden virtual windows that keeps on trying to restart because its done some updates. Whoopti doo! Not to brag, but Ubuntu never really needs to restart after updates and when it thinks it advisable; it merely sugests instead of giving you a 2 minute countdown before the automatic reboot!
A pdf! On Windows! Let me GO LOOK for a pdf reader. Manually. Scour the internet for suitable and trust worthy software. Unthinkable in this day and age. Not to repeat myself, but linux has this out of the box
When I bing for pdf reader it gives me an official pdf reader site, but not from adobe; official?? And when I go to adobe; it requires me to install an ActiveX component before I can download the reader. Cant IE download a simple file without having to install an extra ActiveX component??? And it takes AN ETERNITY to download. A mere 25MB. And now that we re on that.. 25MB? What am I downloading here, the Adobe Operating System???? (restart later) Ah, to read my pdf! ..
Adobe Updater?? Whats that? Most of the windows software installing their own updaters; its no miracle the system is slower that a tortoise on weed!
Another blank page; then a page expired error. This might just take all night!
EEK! The thing just timed out on me, after completing the first 4 parts.. AND NOW I NEED TO START THE FUCK OVER!
Its not that hard to make stuff like this. Its a simple form with some checks.. no Ajax or fancy stuff; just plain old forms! Why The Fuck Doesnt This Work? .. Java!
Im about to give up. I’ll try again tomorrow during the day 😦
And half of that because our FOSS friendly governement doesnt maintain the linux version of their card reader software!
Yeah, I guess this was a rant.
blog.cone 
I don’t know why you have to torture yourself with Windows when you are running Ubuntu.
After I found the appropriate documentation, I had very little trouble with TaxOnWeb. The only thing that you have to remind is the order: first plug in the reader, second insert the card, third start firefox and only then browse to the taxonweb site.
More info on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NederlandstaligeDocumentatie/NlEid
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I doubt this has anything to do with Java. I read somewhere that Tax-On-Web was never tested. No time, no budget. Any language or system like this should be at least properly load-balanced and load-tested. Obviously it wasn’t. No, this is 100% the responsibility of a massively incompetent finance minister.
Now as far as the card reader software is concerned. Linux actually had a version before Windows…
http://www.stroobant.be/eid-taxonweb-linux-1-windows-0
sudo apt-get install libacr38u libacr38ucontrol-dev pcscd
sudo apt-get install beid*
I tried it a while back and it seemed to work just fine in Firefox.
In any case, thanks for the warning. I’m going to try and figure it out using the paper edition. I heard that there have been a few people that managed to decipher it so there must be hope yet, somewhere.
Matt
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Well, I actually have the eid app installed and had it running (I did a post to get the dell latitude internal card reader & the beid working on ubuntu about a year ago) and it worked back then.
The problem is that the software now (a year and 2 moves – and thus eid updates – later) stops on a “Wrong Root Certificate” error. (And also yes, a freshly installed version, so no outdated package there; at least not vs the ubuntu repos) And I have so far not found a solution to that problem.
Which is why I eventually turned to windows to to a quick commit of my “Tax On Web” data. Sadly there was no quick solution 😦
So if Anyone can help me to solve this “Wrong Root Certificate” problem; Id love to hear 🙂
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I just removed the whole eid wad & reinstalled, dev packages included. The error is different now. Now it says “Error : An internal error has been detected, but the source is unknown”
Hardly an improvement.
Ill probably look further into that tonight or maybe later..
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And to elaborate a last time..
gert@Benedict:~$ sudo pkcs11-tool -t
C_SeedRandom() and C_GenerateRandom():
not implemented
Digests:
all 4 digest functions seem to work
MD5: OK
SHA-1: OK
RIPEMD160: OK
Signatures: not logged in, skipping signature tests
Verify: not logged in, skipping verify tests
Key unwrap: not logged in, skipping key unwrap tests
Decryption: not logged in, skipping decryption tests
Testing card detection
Please press return to continue, x to exit:
Available slots:
Slot 0 O2 Micro Oz776 00 00
token label: BELPIC (Basic PIN)
token manuf: (unknown)
token model: PKCS #15 SCard
token flags: rng, login required, PIN initialized, token initialized
serial num : xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Slot 1 (empty)
Slot 2 (empty)
Slot 3 (empty)
Slot 4 (empty)
Slot 5 (empty)
Slot 6 (empty)
Slot 7 (empty)
Please press return to continue, x to exit: 0
Testing card detection using C_WaitForSlotEvent
Please press return to continue, x to exit:
Calling C_WaitForSlotEvent: failed.
ERR: C_WaitForSlotEvent failed: CKR_FUNCTION_NOT_SUPPORTED (0x54)
1 errors
gert@Benedict:~$
Ill decide NOW to let it rest till AFTER I turn in my tax junk in time!
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asfor my tax on web adventure.. after some pages, (most was 7 of 11) it has me restart. Thats obnoxious.
JUNK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Another option would be using token based authentication instead of your eID card. It’s a bit more cumbersome than eID (provided the card reader is up and running properly) but it has worked for me since the first time tax-on-web was available.
A word of advice for all those struggling with tax-on-web today: fill in the damn thing a couple of weeks earlier next year!
Besides, you’re picking on the MS operating system but you are using the MS search engine? That’s odd …
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yeah, but I have the eID so I’ll damn well use it 🙂 I succeeded by now. Im starting to think it was an ie6 issue, since it worked after the upgrade to ie8. Which is moronic since the 6 is officially supported by the system and ie8 is not. To the extent of several warning messages!
This being said, its not the first time I used it either and .. it works. Or rather, it chugs along, but there s apparently a lot of problems too!
Asfor filling it in earlier.. The gov knows to expect this load. They should provision for this. Its not that hard!
And I was using the Bing because its the MS engine. Where else to go for trustworthy MS information and software? Or at least thats what I expected to find – another dissapointment.
Also because the bing comes preconfigured with the windows. I’m not used anymore to spending 2 days reconfiguring an OS before I can actually use it. Ubuntu installs and it just Works. Without 2 days of misery and problems. So I’ve come to demand that of an OS, to the standard search configuration options. And if MS says that I should use bing .. they know their OS; they know where I’m best to look for related info & software.
I guess there s a rant coming about the prevalent practice of installing an OS & then spending 2 days breaking it before its actually usable.
Anywho, the taxes are in for both Me & Viona so Hooray!
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Actually, the government does maintain the Linux version. It just took them ages to bring out the source, and they were totally not in time for me to update the packages in Debian so you could use them
Anyway, once I get around to it (and no, do not ask me when that’ll be), I’ll upload the new version, and you’ll be able to use it on Ubuntu again.
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ooh, thats a nice prospect 🙂
I did install the government debian version in the tries, but it didnt work out of the box & I had no time to look any further back then..
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