I was looking for a nice way to synchronize my Google calendar with iCal on my laptop. Google spit out some dozens of pages explaining how to subscribe to a Google calendar with iCal, which was not exactly what I was looking for, since this is a read only solution and I cannot enter new appointments into the calendar using iCal, only via Google’s web interface.
Then I stumbled upon a very nice solution in knoPerBlog utilizing GCalDaemon for a full sync of the Google web calendar and the local iCal file. Works great for me!