[clug] Light at the end of the Tax Return tunnel

[Francis Whittle]

I managed to get it through this year, everything worked okay.
On a Debian AMD64 box even - and I'd only installed wine 1/2 an hour
before hand.  And IE6 refused to install, so no IE! :D (There's a thing
called "Wine Gecko" and another "Mozilla ActiveX Control" that you
probably need for this).
It lodged, even sent the lodgement number back....

Looked HORRIBLE though (I couldn't see anything on the navigator pane
half the time, for example).

But really, nothing there that couldn't be done with some pretty simple
HTML forms, and it would be a good idea to have SSL certificates (In
fact, everyone could be issued a personal certificate which would remove
the need for those unmemorable 24-bit hex keys, I mean, passwords.  I
guess a 1024-bit key is just as unmemorable, but it's installed on your
computer, eh?)  You could even throw some AJAX in to make it pretty.
Development time?  Oh, I'd give it 2 months just to be thoroughly
tested ;)  Of course, there'd be almost a whole year for A-retentive
testing now.
The long part is, as has been pointed out, converting all that
documentation into a reasonable format.  Although seeing as how Windows
Help files are compiled from RTF or Word format, it shouldn't be too
hard to compile them into, say, HTML, instead.

On Mon, 2007-07-16 at 13:16 +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> Andras Keszei wrote:
> 
> > I did my eTax under wine in Mandriva last year. I had so little tax
> > coming back, I reckoned it wasn't worth booting into windows. Had some
> > spurious error messages, but it went through fine, saved my details for
> > this year, and I even got my tax return.
> 
> I had no problems with last year's under Wine, but this year's hung
> when doing anything requiring internet access (e.g. prefilling data or
> submitting the final tax return).
> 
> Cameron
>