The ribbon cable has a stripe, usually red, to tell you where Pin 1 is on its connectors. It’s finding Pin 1 on the device and on the motherboard that’s the real headache.

The Adafruit Cobbler Breakout Kit for the Raspberry Pi comes supplied with a 26 pin ribbon cable, a custom PCB, ribbon cable socket and header pins, and only requires a little soldering to construct.

So I'm looking for what the name of the IDE connector on the ribbon cable is. I need to hit Radioshack and/or Fry's to try and get some 0.1 inch 26-pin connectors so I can butcher some IDE cables ...