Pjm on irc has been keeping us up to date with his machine progress.
At the moment he is using 3 printer ports :)
He is using a 360ppr spindle encoder on the spindle.
There is a lot of info and more pictures on the emc wiki.
http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?Pjm
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SER-N6jJHg&feature=channel_page"]YouTube - rigid tapping with EMC 2.3 beta[/ame]
http://pjm.dyndns.org/cam/cnc1.jpg