Fun fact: Google Reader will understand http://twitter.com/username as an RSS feed. The trick is to remove the hashbang that Twitter automatically adds to the URL (i.e. http://twitter.com/#!/username) before attempting to add it as a feed.
If there are .svn directories still present, it's likely that they just copied a working copy to their web server. You're supposed to use "svn export" to create a "production" version without the .svn directories. Or just delete them. Either way, this is really VCS misuse more than anything else.
Thanks for your post, ashishk. I've been ogling the various netbooks/ultraportables/what-have-you, not wanting to spend gobs of money but also really wanting to have one, just for the sake of having one. This seems like a nice compromise between those two conflicting desires.