I just love the way hes got 'jtag' written on the ribbon cable.Altera have released the schematics for the byteblaster and bitblaster pc printer port to jtag drivers and they are just buffers basically.But using that kind of bread board system which high frequency clocks and signals with fast rise and fall times is just asking for trouble.
You can buy,and ive seen them on ebay a simple development kit which consists of a cpld and or fpga,the voltage regulators and jtag port with provision for configuration memory all on a neat board which you can simply plug into your project which makes the whole thing a lot easier.