The simple parallel programmer described on the arduino site works for a lot of people, but it did not work at all for me. I suspect some basic hardware incompatibility with my computer's parallel port.
I built one like you describe with a 74hc244 and it worked great the first time.
I eventually spent US$34 on an Atmel avrispmkII (when AVRdude became able to use the USB interfaced mkII on Mac OS X).
-j