The latest news on the fire as the weather goes back to hot and dry with gusty winds.

Australia really needs to look seriously as air tankers, and expanding their fleet. They might consider the roll-on/roll-off systems for the C-130s that the US National Guard uses, as the RAAF also flies the Hercules.

Of course the conservative Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, says the UN climate official who linked the bushfires and climate change is talking through her hat, because his friends in the energy industry tell him there is no link, or something …

Lambert has a New York Times story on the ACA web site and its problems. It is essentially a typical government IT SNAFU: 7 change orders in the 10 months before the launch, and a delay in providing specifications to the programmers.

This thing should have been finished on July 1^st at the absolute latest for an October 1^st launch, and that is really three months short of good practice for major projects. It takes time to test big systems. I would have wanted a minimum of a thousand people who weren’t IT professionals banging on the project to catch the most obvious of errors. I can almost guarantee that anything that might be called testing was done by the people who wrote the code, which is a terrible idea if you are looking for bugs.

This system was supposed to interface with other Federal systems to verify some of the input, but when it was launched the government was in shutdown, so some of those systems may have been off-line.

Originally this was supposed to be the portal to 50 state systems that would actually process the information and provide the user with options, but about two dozen Republican controlled states refused to create exchanges.

The Medicare site is really straight-forward and a mature site. If they had permitted people to buy into Medicare, this would have been a lot easier, with a lot less drama.

Position: 29.6N 50.0W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: East [085°] near 9 mph [15 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 50 mph [ 85 kph].
Wind Gusts: 60 mph [ 95 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 70 miles [110 km].
Minimum central pressure: 1003 mb.

Currently about 895 miles [1440 km] East of Bermuda.

The Storm is headed into an unfavorable environment and is expected to begin weakening.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]