/var/log growing rapidly

[Paul Cartwright <ale@pcartwright.com>]

I don't know what changed, but I think an update must have changed a parameter 
or something. there are a bunch of log files that are now growing lots faster 
* bigger than they were 2 days ago: messages, kern.log, daemon.log, syslog. 
see:
:/var/log# ls -l mess*
-rw-r----- 1 root adm 103306889 2008-11-17 21:53 messages
-rw-r----- 1 root adm   27868134 2008-11-17 07:53 messages.0
-rw-r----- 1 root adm           3264 2008-11-16 08:05 messages.1.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm       495379 2008-11-13 07:49 messages.2.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm         15798 2008-11-09 08:14 messages.3.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm           2089 2008-11-02 08:09 messages.4.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm           5948 2008-10-19 07:46 messages.5.gz

# ls -ltr sys*
-rw-r----- 1 root adm        114684 2008-11-11 07:58 syslog.6.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm        201577 2008-11-12 07:58 syslog.5.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm        849332 2008-11-13 07:51 syslog.4.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm        383545 2008-11-14 08:04 syslog.3.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm        233439 2008-11-15 07:58 syslog.2.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm        234861 2008-11-16 08:05 syslog.1.gz
-rw-r----- 1 root adm   34629008 2008-11-17 07:53 syslog.0
-rw-r----- 1 root adm  106372318 2008-11-17 21:54 syslog

how do I turn down these logs??
-- 
Paul Cartwright
Registered Linux user # 367800
Registered Ubuntu User #12459