any of you that know me personally know my feeling on Government, Politicians, Beuracracy and the like.
Today i had the brief pleasure of speaking to a member of the ROS tech support(Revenue On Line). Head scratching is the best way of describing it!
If you use ROS there is a Login area. This login area provides you with digital certs, and requires Java and KCrypto. This is all well and good. But if you are in an environment that prohibits the download of JAR’s or other executable programs, then you have a problem. The Revenue, in its infinite wisdom refuses to provide a link to the download of the KCrypto jar. why? fucked if i know to be honest.
The person on the phone had an answer for me.
“Its a third party software, we cannot support it”
Thats fair enough. So provide a disclaimer stating so, AND GIVE ME THE FUCKIN JAR FILE!
After a bit of a google, it seems that ROS and anyone using Unix or MacOS do not get along. Does this mean that those people dont have to pay for such a shit service? Fuck no, i would think the Collector General has his AWStats print out and is desperate to find a way to tax people with an “unknown” Operating System
But i digress. In the end i found the Jar, handily on the ros.ie website, https://www.ros.ie/applets/kcrypto-sun-1.4.jar, thanks to a fellow blogger http://atownley.org/2007/01/ros-vs-linux-making-it-work/
After i had downloaded and put it in the appropriate directory ($JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/ext) everything worked lovely.
However i did discover something interesting. On the machine i was working on, the D:\ drive was the system drive. It was a HP machine, and a restore using the HP Restore partition did this. No big deal. Except that the ROS site has hard coded into itself to look on the C: drive for the Digital Cert.
I was tempted to tear the phone tech a new place in time. But she was in her late forties. And clearly only in the game for the pension. And the two phone calls a day. Im probably just jealous (Edit: i am fucking jealous, that feckin yoke gets a massive pension, huge benefits, and a lovely salary scale, i get to deal with these kind of feckin eejits!!!!)
Now i did have a thought half an hour later. Why not check the $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/ext on the original computer and see if there was KCrypto in there! 
Hindsight is 20/20
