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I hope never to be this brilliant

I know I should be furiously relating anecdotes about Italy and the CIRN conference and all that, but I’m really caught up in being reattached to the internet. I have a lot of places to visit, many odd cyberbeasties to trawl, before I can go back to telling my own stories.

This summer I read one of the most fascinating articles of my life. It was from Wired, which makes it no small surprise I thought it above the cut. It’s about Hans Reiser and how he’s been accused of murdering his ex-wife.

The article is wonderful because it’s written by a geek, about a geek. So states the author in the first page:

I’m here because his defense lawyer thinks I will understand Reiser. The accused is a 43-year-old geek — he lives in his own world of computer code, videogames, and science fiction books. He spent his early twenties developing a role-playing game to compete with Dungeons & Dragons while writing a novel about aliens invading Earth. By age 30, he’d decided that his talents would be better applied to recrafting overlooked aspects of the Linux operating system. As a technology writer, I frequently meet people like this. Just because he doesn’t behave like the rest of us — and just because he evaded police surveillance and bought a book titled Masterpieces of Murder shortly after his wife’s disappearance — doesn’t mean he’s guilty. I have been asked to try to understand this, to try to understand the man.

(You know what? I suck at quoting. I always try to contextualize the quote by pasting in more of the surrounding text, rather than introduce it better. Please accept this as part of my exuberant, if occasionally ungainly, personality.)

The author of the article proves his mettle by heeding Reiser’s admonition of journalistic indolence and looks to the code. Throughout the article, snippets of the Reiser4 filesystem are pasted in, providing overtones to the discussion sometimes surprising, other times downright haunting.

I dig out this article because the trial for the murder charges against Reiser began this week, and Wired has picked up coverage again. All posts on the subject can be found here, at Threat Level.

The defense doesn’t seem to be going well. Reiser’s own lawyer says he has an extremely abrasive personality, and that his brilliance will alienate the jury:

DuBois said Hans Reiser has memorized thousands of pages of pretrial court documents, and can cite a page by memory — making defending him “a challenging thing.”

“It would be easy if he didn’t testify,” added DuBois, who was flanked by more than a dozen print, online and television reporters in the hallway outside Alameda County Superior Court Judge Larry J. Goodman’s courtroom here. DuBois said he was wishful that Reiser’s testimony will be “in a manner that everybody can understand.”

Did he kill her? I haven’t formed even an uneducated guess yet. I know that I believe the man to be one of the smartest men of the twentieth century, and I hope he will never lose the spirit or ability to continue his work.

But he is fucking impossible to understand.