LNGoogleCalSync is a free, open-source solution. It’s a small Java application that will allow you to specify your Lotus Notes details, along with your Google Calendar details, and update any new meetings or appointments from your Lotus Notes calendar to Google Calendar.

Notifications can be transferred as Reminders in Google Calendar, and then also synchronized to a multitude of mobile devices such as iPhones and Android devices.

Regular synchronization of this application is also easy. Running the program with the ‘-silent’ parameter, will hide any GUI prompts. Task Scheduler can be used in Windows XP, Vista and 7, to allow for regular synchronization updates.

The main website seems to be slightly out of date, in terms of information, however the download link will still provide you with the latest version from the Source Forge project page.

Visit the LNGoogleCalSync Website!

My personal primary use of this tool includes pinning my lecture notes to products from the office suite, as well as folders with subject information for quick access.

Unfortunately, I’ve experienced a slight issue, in particular with the Office 2007 Word jump list. While I am now using Office 2010, I felt the problem and subsequent solution was worth publishing should anyone else, still using Office 2007, experience the same issue.

The problem in question; Occasionally I have found that the Jump Lists would be cleared for no apparent reason, and would not allow any documents to be pinned, nor update with any recent documents. This left me with a jumplist like the picture below;

From a technical perspective, the reason behind this is still unknown, however a solution does exist. After some Googling lead me to this post, with subsequent solution to the problem. While the solution won’t restore the previously pinned items, it will allow you to pin new items, and restore the ‘Recent Items’ functionality.

1. Navigate to %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations
2. Check for, and delete, any files that are large in size compared to others (probably anything above the 1 MB mark).
3. If that doesn’t fix the issue, you can also delete all of these files safely, however you will lose any pinned items on other applications in the taskbar.
4. You should now be able to pin new items to the jump list. Additionally, recent items should start appearing as you view new documents.

Many of the Half-Life 2 tracks use extremely heavy baselines; they should be listened to on a decent sound system, with a decent sub woofer, in order to give the tracks, the justice they deserve

In addition to the note above; the quality of the clips below compares only marginally to that on the official sound track (which happens to come with Audiosurf).

Triage at Dawn

Song #16

CP Violation

Requiem for Ravenholm

Escape Array

Guard Down

Vortal Combat

Sector Sweep

Last Legs

Below are some select sound tracks, one or two from the official sound track, and the remainder from in-game locations by third party artists;

I’m listing these first; purely because I prefer to listen to them first

Club Afterlife
(Saki Kaska – Callista)

Club Dark Star
(John Morgan – Happiness)

Humans are Disappearing

The Illusive Man

The music in Mass Effect was unfortunately not as ‘significant’ as I would have liked it to be. The tracks all seemed to lack the “ability” to be listened to outside of the game. A lot of the tracks were required to be coupled alongside game play in order to make their effect more prominent. This rendered the official soundtrack regrettably “forgettable”.

However, with every batch of not-so-great game music, or there are some stand out tracks from Mass Effect that provided that “Zelda-music like” connection to the game.

Only a select few from the album made it here. Vigil being my favourite (and Mass Effect menu music), with a good old “Love Theme” rendition coming in second. “Uncharted Worlds” was at first slightly ‘annoying’ but it grew on me over time. “Feros” gets an honourable mention, but once again, requires you to be “in the game” to experience it at it’s full potential.

Vigil

Love Theme

Uncharted Worlds

Feros

Sonic the Hedgehog! Only after finding a quiz on Sporcle related directly to the game music, it wasn’t until then that the memories of the classic Green Hill Zone and super trendy Chemical Plant Zone music came flooding back. Below is the collection of my favourite Sonic zone themes.

Greenhill Zone

Spring Yard Zone

Mystic Cave Zone

Labyrinth Zone

Boss Music

Emerald Hill Zone

Chemical Plant Zone

Hill Top Zone

Special Stage Zone

Marble Garden Zone (Act 1)

Carnival Night Zone (Act 1)

Mushroom Hill Zone (Act 1)

Mushroom Hill Zone (Act 2)

Flying Battery Zone (Act 1)

Flying Battery Zone (Act 2)

While it may be dependant on the game in question, I’m not having a ‘go’ at the game itself, but the people and consequent websites who believe the GTA and Guitar Hero music is proper video game music.

On a final note, this page may be quite memory consuming with all the embedded files — but hey, it’s worth it

Okay, so rant aside, I decided to post my own thoughts of some of my favourite game music. The list below isn’t ranked in any sort of order, but is instead merely a collection of game music/themes that have stuck with me.

What can I say, I could publish a single post full of Zelda music. The following represents the tiniest fraction of the amazing music throughout the N64 Zelda series.

Calling the Four Giants

Pirate Fortress Theme

Song of Healing

Last End (The Final Hour)

Midna’s Theme

Midna’s Desperate Hour

The orchestral pieces through Oblivion are quite amazing; here are two pieces, one from general travelling and one played while in a town

Atmosphere #7

Town #5

The Terran theme was always nice throughout during a game of ‘Sunken D’ or ‘Tower D’.

Terran Theme #2

Terran Theme #3

Fable contains a few nice orchestral pieces throughout the world of Albion. Some of the tracks are just slight derivations (e.g. Temple of Light and Hall of Heroes) of each other. While this may suggest that the tune gets repetitive, it doesn’t

Greatwood

Temple of Light
Hall of Heroes

Oakvale
Hook Coast
Knothole Glade

While this is an amazing game, there were only two pieces that really stood out as music that could be listened to independent of the game. Most of the music needs to be coupled with the nature of the game to be appreciated in full.

Welcome to Rapture

Cohens Masterpiece

This game contains some nice orchestral pieces as well including a new take on the original Super Mario Bros theme from the NES days.

Super Mario 2007

Still Alive

Menu Music

Sometimes not all games have access to professional music development bodies, composers or large orchestras. This means they may need to rely on other peoples creations in order to help introduce a musical dimension into the game. While this may seem to contradict the previous ‘real world game music’ statement, it comes down to the type of game in question. Indie games like Braid, made by independent, small time developers, rely on this ‘real world’ music distributed by small time music labels.

I would like to include all the tracks from this game, however I would also prefer that your browser didn’t crash under the weight of  all flash content

Tell It By Heart

Some game music gains enough momentum that it becomes an inspiration source for musical talent around the world. The Legend of Zelda in particular provides an ‘epic’ source of inspiration for people to start following music on the piano, and other instruments.

The violin compliments this Zelda song so well

Song of Storms Violin Remix

To re-iterate, using real world songs in a game may be preferable to other music; some prime examples include GTA IV and Guitar Hero. Other games, like Fallout 3 for example, utilise a compilation of real world music to provide an experience unique to the storyline or general game play.

I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire

Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall

Schweine (Vladivostok FM)

The odd situation is, that I tend to clean my keyboard while having the computer on — while voice chatting or waiting for a new game to install, I subconsciously clean the keyboard, but also tend to write an essay of jargon at the same time from accidental key presses.

This application, “Keyboard and Mouse Disabler” has only one known purpose so far, and that is to make cleaning your keyboard and mouse peripherals easy. With a few clicks, your mouse and keyboard will be temporarily disabled, preventing accidental key presses and mouse clicks — then it’s cleaning time

There is no install required, it runs straight from the download. While this may seem to be a rather trivial application to release, I thought why not. If someone finds a use for it — great

Download Keyboard and Mouse Disabler!

Click the image to make it bigger, if it’s still not big enough, Right click then “Open in new tab/window” or similar.

Contents

1. Log Events
2. Writing Events to the Log
3. Writing Errors to the Log
4. So where does the log file end up?
5. Level specific Logging
6. In Conclusion

As I have learnt over the years, at a certain stage of application development logging becomes critical. It is imperative during testing (especially with multiple, external testers) that they can report any problems or issues in the most efficient manner; this usually entails sending  a log file which the developer can use to locate and debug the bug.

VB.NET comes with its own ‘logging’ sub-system integrated into the language. It allows the developer to place entries into the log file at specified points in the code. These entry points are usually placed at strategic points, such as in the catch statement of a Try… Catch or at the end of a long process to indicate completion.

The logging sub-system of VB.NET resides under the My.Application.Log namespace. Under this namespace are several functions and concepts, that I will detail below, which will let you start logging in your own applications.

Several functions under this namespace allow you to write events to the log file. An ‘entry’ essentially, is composed of a string Message, a Severity Level and an Event ID.

The Message is a string that the developer specifies to appear in the log file. It should generally detail a stage in the code (e.g. “Starting update…”).

The Severity Level is used to determine how ‘critical’ the entry or exception is. This level is only used to help filter out critical events from the less critical ones. For example, an event of a failed update, “Update failed” should be classes at a error level, while an event such as “Starting update” should only be classed as an information level.

Other levels, such as a ‘critical’, are usually reserved for an error that causes the application to cease functioning.

The Event ID attribute is a way help index and identify the errors that may occur for correlation purposes. It is optional attribute when writing an event. It is usually reserved for error events as opposed to verbose events.

You can write events to the log by calling a function under the My.Application.Log namespace. The following code write an example event to the log;

My.Application.Log.WriteEntry("Starting to process function XYZ", TraceEventType.Verbose)

As noted above, the Event ID attribute is optional; it may be considered in-effective to index verbose level messages; reserving the event ID’s for error and critical level events.

When writing Errors to the log a slightly different and specialized function may be used. The WriteError function will write details of an ‘exception’ caught during a Try… Catch statement. It is invoked similar to the code example below;

Try
    Throw New Exception("A sample error exception")
Catch ex As Exception
     My.Application.Log.WriteException(ex, TraceEventType.Error, "Additional information or details")
End Try

Once the error exception is raised within the Try block, the WriteException event will write the exception details (ex) to the log. The same severity level option can be applied, as well as some additional notes to make debugging easier.

When the application closes, and the log file has been flushed to disk the file can be retrieved for analysis. By default it is placed in the user’s Roaming profile under a subdirectory relevant to your application name. To save some time, you can find out the direct path, and for example, show it in a message box, while running the program by executing the following line of code;

MsgBox(My.Application.Log.DefaultFileLogWriter.FullLogFileName)

As with any logging sub-system, some performance overhead (while extremely minimal) may be invoked. To help reduce this, it is possible to only log events that may be considered more relevant than others.

As discussed above the Severity Level can help rank events on a scale of severity, from Verbose to Critical. Similarly we can choose to only log events that we deem important on a release application, for example only events higher than the Informational level. We can choose programmatically as to which events should be included and which should not. The code below sets this level to log events only Information and above.

My.Application.Log.TraceSource.Switch.Level = SourceLevels.Information

The hierarchy of severity levels can be determined using the table below (source).

SourceLevels Value	Message severity required for output
Critical	Critical
Error	Critical or Error
Warning	Critical, Error, or Warning
Information	Critical, Error, Warning, or Information
Verbose	Critical, Error, Warning, Information, or Verbose
ActivityTracing	Start, Stop, Suspend, Resume, or Transfer
All	All messages are allowed.
Off	All messages are blocked.

In Conclusion

Logging becomes essential in larger, more complex programs with several teste. Hopefully the outline of the logging system above will make it simple to implement basic logging capabilities into your own application.