Hi James,
I was told by some other members in OpenACS that you could do the following:
ns_log notice "UNIQUESTRING: The print statement and $variable"
then to view the output you could do something like:
cat /usr/local/aolserver/yourserver-error.log | grep UNIQUESTRING
You could also use 'less'.
Im new to all of this so it is probably not the best way of doing it but it might help you for the meantime.
Hope that helps,
Ayman.