Electronic filing of tax returns

Every year we do this. I mean filing tax returns. Is it fun, pleasure, caution, warning or frustration? Typical cycle goes like this. From Jan we keep getting calls for tax saving bonds. We get to hear many discussions around coffee machines about these bonds. Some desire to invest conservatively and few others go with the wind. Those invested go around finance desks to include their new investments. That part ends by end of March.

April is the time to declare the investments for next year. So based on previous year experiences we tend to improve it. But changes in Union budget leave us with lot of confusion. Then we need reviews on budget from finance gurus to make an optimum investment declaration.

End of June is the time for mails, to float around, about tax returns. This exercise is compulsory. Normally organization calls an agency for this sake. Those babus offer this service for hefty price. By Aug 15 we get acknowledged returns. We are expected to keep these papers carefully. Then there won’t be any activity till next Jan.

Year after year we do this job in almost similar manner. I didn't see any change in this process in last seven years. Taxes are for building nation. But lot us got concerns about proper utilization of funds raised from taxes. What I understand is most of the time this money goes to repay the loans we take from worldwide banks. I don’t think we are in a position to plan to do anything with our own money. Surveys reveal that only 10+ % of population pays tax.

There are several kinds of taxes that we pay. But the bulk out of them is income tax.
Take the case of Municipal Corporation or Road Transport Authority. We can pay property tax online as well Road tax. They streamlined their process so much that tax payer need not face bureaucratic hierarchy in their offices.

But what is lacking with income tax department (ITD)? I have following queries
1) ITD operates on much much higher volumes still they are unable to streamline the process. Do they lack money? Of course NO
2) Unlike customers of RTO department majority of tax payers are well educated and can take benefit of advanced means to file tax returns. But still why ITD can’t improve the process of filing returns?
3) Why can’t Income Tax Act be in colloquial language or even in plain English?
Why so much of legal nomenclature? So many inter links within sections?
4) When can we file returns ourselves online and can see the process of the file online?
5) Do we hold PAN card for IT department’s sake or for the sake of a loans from banks? What is the information that a tax payer can access with PAN? If it is mere a number for ITD reference but to be maintained by tax payer
6) There are penalties for those who evade tax, but what are the incentives for regular tax payers? Just because very few people pay taxes we cant expect anything of this sort.
7) Why not the whole process tax-payer friendly?

I think even before expecting our governments to do something productive out of funds collected from taxes, we should ensure that they provide hassle free means to pay it.

getting bits

I just got an Airtel unlimited braodband connection. Though the stated bandwidht is around 256 kbps i am getting a good 200 kbps and 13-23 KBps download speed. But surprisingly when I try to use bittorrent bandwidth falls down to 100 odd. Airtel cutomer care representative simply gave me referece number for a complaint.

Please can someone share some gyan about why it happens so..

is blog a page 3 on webspace

What is that Govt is concerned about and the huge uproar that blogging community started againt Govt ? Is it mere suspicion ? Something awry here. Typical tendency is - who cares about what I scribble here ? There are many blogs which post messages about last night movie or a photograph of a party. They are more like personalised page3 of daily print media. And ofcourse typically that is the impression blogging held so far.

Government's order to block blogspot and other sites triggered some adverse views. Its unfortunate but heat of the moment played role there. This incident exposed bloggers across geographical sections of this nation. Well I could never ever convince anybody what I get by scribbling rubbish that goes in my mind onto a webspace. However it might be, so far it didn't harm anyone so I guess there is nothing wrong here...

Back

Its exactly three months since I last visited my lj space. For some reason writing rate is ramping down. So I just thought of taking up it agian before I complete loose interest in it.
Actually one of the reasons is time and content. I do update my desklog regularly. But that is internal to office. I am using logahead for that on apache web server. So I have one or other thing to put on every week or so. Similary I scribble about some tech bits on sriharshavardhan.blogspot.com. As such I am not hitting keys explicitly.

Here goes another attempt to restart... Probable reason being, now i can insert images here...

Maximum threads per process – where is the bottleneck??

Recently I was doing an OPC compliance test on one of the IO severs that we developed.
There is a tool for this compliance test from OPCFoundation.org. By default tool tries to test using 10 servers, 10 groups per server and 10 items per group kind of configuration.

But the test case asked for compliance with 100 servers each with 10 groups or 10 servers each with 100 groups. Though the first case doesn’t appeal much, second case definitely does. But this IO server failed to cope up with that kind of load and started crashing after adding around 70 odd servers. Kind soul who logged the bug actually gave me all scripts so that I could recreate the condition at ease.

Suggestions came from many circles to check for resource usage. Isn’t that obvious!!!
A process which is so excessively hungry dies while eating itself. So the idea led to capture memory and thread consumption. All that I could observe is 1980 odd threads and sad demise. So it was not difficult guess to think of magical limit of 2048 as limit on number of threads per process.

Now I started hitting google to substantiate the limit I observed. Google gave me a page from Microsoft site. So here is what Microsoft got to explain about the limit.

Windows operating System allocates one mega bytes of memory as default stack size per thread. So in this case 2048 threads swallowed 2 Gigabytes of memory. Unfortunately that is the limit on user space virtual memory allocation per process. As 4 GB is max per process 2GB goes on user side and remaining 2 GB goes to kernel side.

Isn’t an MB of memory per thread too much!!!!!!

Posix threads can address this situation with stacksize member of pthread_attr_t. But there is catch here too, if you don’t specify this parameter, pthread library tries to assign it with operating system’s default. And Another member of pthread_attr_t is guardsize which has a default value of size of a page (4KB).