For those of you looking for a cheap programmer, a par port programmer will do fine. There are a bunch of designs that include a 74HCxxx buffer chip, but even that is unneccesary. As long as you're very careful the circuit is not connected to anything else, you probably won't blow up your parport.

Programming real stuff becomes annoying during development though: Programming is kind of slow, and cannot be done safely with the target circuit "live". So I finally gave up and built my own stk500V2 compatible programmer.

(according to the captch, though, I'm not sentient... 2 times so far...)