I'm familiar with acid/base and another one or two front ends that escapes my memory. But I'm eager to have the iptables logs to study as I need to keep my snort rules quite tight and narrow in this instance for a couple of reasons.

I've never bothered learning perl to be honest, but it sounds like it could be the right time.

And don't get me wrong I'm not trying to say grep is invaluable at all, I know very well it isn't. But its interesting to note that if you search the securityfocus.com tool archives looking for iptables utilities you'll find 3 pages of tools that will quite happily make rule-sets for you, but not much in the way of log analysis. Its a luxury provided to (all?) commercial firewalls afaik, so why not iptables users? Myself I'm all about working smarter and not harder, so if I can point and click some info I'm quite happy to do that as opposed to pipe commands for a laugh