Another one bites the dust

My brown silk shirt, having been repeatedly patched/reinforced in the armpits, has now ripped again down the arm the first time I wore it after mending the previous rip -- I could darn it again with an underlying patch, but I just don't think it's worth it. The garment is obviously worn out. It did manage another two years after the initial patching operation.

The sides-to-middle sheet, on the other hand, has been functioning very nicely once I finally finished all those darns and got the worn edges through the hemmer attachment on my WW1 sewing machine; that's the difference between holes in otherwise sound material and holes caused by cloth wearing too thin to stand up to the normal strains of wear.

(And the reflector has come off the rear wheel of my bicycle, or at least one end of the plastic snapped so that it was hanging loose and banging dangerously. Fortunately wheel reflectors -- as opposed to pedal reflectors -- are not a legal requirement. Unfortunately the gear change is still not working reliably.)

Stats 1.01

I managed to notice the first serious bug in my AO3 stats script, when "High City on a Hill" failed to show up as having any new hits at all for the month of March.

Because awk handles all input as text by default, the values for the number of hits etc. are being saved as text strings instead of numeric values, which means that in a comparison "6" is treated as greater than "3", but "112" is treated as less than "31" (because "1" at the start of the 'word' is less than "3"). So if the difference between two values is sufficiently large for them to have a differing number of digits, the results of the comparison become entirely spurious :-p

The answer is to multiply all values which are intended to be numeric by 1, in order to ensure that awk knows to store (and compare) them as numbers and not strings!