Ah, you’ve run into the government’s ePass “solution”, quite possibly the most craptastic web app ever developed. I ran head-first into this thing when I tried to do my taxes last year (http://www.postal-code.com/mrhappy/blog/?p=884) and it almost made me renounce my citizenship. Christ, I hate that thing.

Not to mention, it’s completely open to cross-site scripting!

I’ve been running into this error all day while attempting to renew my passport!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I know! How much did we pay for this piece of junk?!

I found the service to be very good, the tech’s are genius and very fast!

hahah You wouldn’t happen to work for the government, would you?

Check my later post about how insecure the system is.

Now, now. Everybody must live with the frustration of a world not as perfect as our own little person.

If the Passport application system was able to handle a sudden increase (what? 500% maybe? thanks to USA) without a glitch, it would mean that for many years this system had been running with way too much bandwidth and server muscles. Who would be crying then? Chris, Jonathan, Clay and their friends would be crying to the world that the government was wasting money all these years running such a system!

Those who like wining will always have a good reason to do so.

“renounce my citizenship” you say? Your lifestyle allows you to travel the world and you would give it up because you had to type a few extra characters on a keyboard? Excuse me while I puke…

Have a nice trip anyway, Chris

Jim Bob and Jo Blo> Forgetting about the 500 errors for a minute, the system is fundamentally insecure. It is completely open to exploit by a hacker. Since you guys work for the government (according to your IP-block at least) could you please alert someone to this problem? I’m honestly worried that the Canadian government is going to get p0wned in a big way by this. Then we’ll have to listen to the news media “expose” the truth for months

In my post I point out specifically that the issue with the ePass system are not load-based but rather the product of extremely poor design and implementation approaches using inherently bulky and flawed web technology.

That ePass cannot scale to handle load (btw, the US passport glut has been news for two years ePass developer dudes. How much more lead-time do you need?) in a dynamic fashion is not an excuse, it is another fundamental design flaw.

“Ah ah the load is big, the load is big!” is a faliure to do your jobs and thus a failure to the citizens of Canada, who pay your salaries. It’s not an excuse to cry to mommy. The rest of the web world manages to make do somehow, don’t they?

Final note to the government employees who snuck in and posted without name: don’t hate the user man, hate the application. Peace.

I would like to take this opportunity to distance myself from Chris’ comments (no matter how bang-on they are). Please don’t add me to the CSIS watch-list

OMG! I tried to use the passport renewal service online—brutal. It kept saying that the application didn’t support my browser??? so I used my mac…still didn’t work, so I used my other PC, still didn’t work (Error 500, Error 500) I wonder if a single human being exists who was actually able to use this application successfully???