On Sun, 2010-06-13 at 18:59 -0700, Josh Faust wrote:
> The output will always go to the node's log file, even if you're not
> running it through roslaunch.  

That is unclear from the documentation, also now that I'm looking at it
I am pretty sure the logs end up in ~/.ros/log not $ROS_ROOT/log

http://www.ros.org/wiki/roslaunch/XML/node

output="log|screen"(optional) 

      * If 'screen', stdout/stderr from the node will be sent to the
        screen. If 'log', the output will be sent to a log file in
        $ROS_ROOT/log. The default is 'log'.