What a fiasco!

April 30th 2005 was the last day to file taxes for this year. As in the previous years, I have always filed it about two to three days before the deadline and this year was no exception. It has always been a breeze and with no hickups.

BUT, this year, that was not to be the case. I started my filing on Friday April 29th at about 10am or so and I just could not complete the work. I did not get to do a final submission until about 12:45 am May 1st!!!

What has happened is that the venerable IRAS has decided to update their efiling and in doing so, deployed an operating system that is not known to be good for anything other than playing games and is a safe haven for harbouring viruses, trojans and spyware.

Why am I as a tax payer being subjected by the tax man who has succumed to the OS-company-tax and deployed broken-OS? Should I continue to pay the tax man only for some of it to be handed it over to broken-OS-company? We need the IRAS to run Linux in their infrastructure and not that proprietary broken OS! Heck, they should just run the proprietary Solaris OS – which was what they had previously!

Urrrrggghhh!

FWIW, here are the screenshots of the errors encountered:
a) Netcraft.com detailing the site – running windows 2003 server
b) The 1st failure – .NET?!? For a mission critical system?
c) The next failure – server too busy at 11:07pm? Could not have been /.ed? They do not even know of /.
d) The next failure – error after logging in.
e) The next failure – Runtime error?
f) The next failure – it is 11:18 pm on April 30 and the site has to be, let me guess, rebooted?
g) The next screen showing the main login page but notice the extra “nCSM…” tag at the top of the page? Looks like they are testing something on a live production site!
h) The next screen shows the redirection after logging in via SingPass – but this page kept going back to the one that brought me there – the login.
i) The next failure – it is 11:48pm, do you know what’s happening to your Microsoft Windows single-threaded server?
j) The next failure – sigh.
k) The next failure – “Service Unavailable!”
l) And the final failure – I give up!