Better buddy alerts; log flushing

[Yang Zhang]

Hi, I'd like to use buddy pounces to see a short history of the status 
changes of a small set of users.

If I try to set up popup window pounces, then I end up with a hojillion 
windows because these users may be changing their status a whole bunch.

If I try to use the IM window pounces, then it's almost what I want, 
except it's annoying to have these displays alongside my regular IM 
conversations (can't tell which tabs are actually conversations).  Plus 
I end up with a bunch of garbage logs, because I use the plug-in for 
displaying user status changes in the IM window.

Is there any plug-in out there that comes close to providing what I want?

Also, how do logs (in particular system logs) get flushed?  Are they 
flushed within a certain time bound?  I'm wondering if I can just write 
a small shell script that follows the .system logs and greps for the 
users I care about.

Thanks in advance!
-- 
Yang Zhang
http://www.mit.edu/~y_z/