I think it is useful to look at the design of other solutions that attempt to solve similar problems when coming up with our own implementation. This is a look Gmail, which I think we can learn a lot from.
I think that email interfaces deal with a lot of the same problems that we are trying to solve with the log browser. Often times people are trying to:
Find a message by keyword
Find a message from particular sender
See messages in the context of other messages
in the list view where all messages are shown
in the detailed view where related messages are shown
Messages can be forwarded (think resubmitted)
Messages can be downloaded
Messages can be filtered by date
Messages can have bulk actions performed on them
People want to be able to go through a large amount of messages fast (think pages and the arrows)
Would people want to be able to compose a message in this modal?