As I’m sitting here at work, looking out my window at the gray sky that’s getting darker ever earlier, I’m noticing that there’s already a bit of color in the leaves of the trees.

Fall is approaching quickly.

Spam is never fun to deal with. Recently, spambots discovered the bug tracking system for the Classroom Presenter for the XO project and have been submitting bogus bug reports full of links. It’s a pain to have to set up spam filters for this kind of stuff, and to have to manually delete the ones that make it through the filters.

In the process of trying to clean up some of the resulting mess, I noticed that Ordered Pixels was running really slowly, and discovered that I had an old, unused version of the phpBB2 forum software that I had installed a while back to experiment with. Spambots had also found this, and were making spam posts as fast as they possibly could, overwhelming the mysql database server. By the time I discovered it, they had made over a hundred thousand posts, generating database files several gigabytes in size.

It never feels very productive or satisfying to deal with this kind of stuff.