I get this:
simon-wolfs-computer:~/Desktop/DevCon2006 Simon$ ls -la
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 Simon Simon 68 Jun 1 11:40 .
drwx------ 14 Simon Simon 476 Sep 23 00:51 ..
I have also had a situation where extracting a SIT file results in a directory being created but it being invisible to Finder. The logs have the same error message for this. Creating a new directory to force a refresh didn't help.