www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-07/ff_hansreiser
Arraigned for murder in October 2006, Reiser is being held in Santa Rita Jail near San Francisco. Hans Reiser is waiting for me, standing on the other side of an imitation-wood table. Reiser is wearing the red jumpsuit of a prisoner in solitary confinement, though he has been allowed to meet with me in this chilly visiting room. There was a time when he was known as a cantankerous but visionary open source programmer. he was widely credited (and sometimes reviled) for rethinking the structure of the Linux operating system. It's an awkward moment -- his wrists are chained to his waist. It's mid-December now, and he's been in this jail 40 miles east of San Francisco for two months, ever since the Alameda County District Attorney's office accused him of murdering Nina Reiser, his estranged wife. The police found drops of her blood in Reiser's house and car, and, when they picked him up on an Oakland street to swab his mouth for DNA, he was carrying his passport and $8,960 in cash in a fanny pack. At the police station, they photographed his body for signs of scratches or bruises. By this time, though, he had been under surveillance for three weeks. The police had followed him on foot, tailed his car, and even tracked him by airplane. On October 10, he was arrested, locked up, and, days later, charged with murder. I'm the first new face he's seen from the outside world. 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. And so I shake his shackled hand and ask my first question.
When you double-click a Microsoft Word document on your desktop, for instance, the file system tells the processor where to find the data. When you upload a picture from your camera, the file system decides how to place the information on your hard drive. Every bit and byte -- including the operating system itself -- has its place in the layers upon layers of branching directories. "A file system represents the roads and waterways of the OS," Reiser tells me. For the past two decades, he has struggled to create a different method of organizing data. His approach, known as ReiserFS, is a file system unlike any other. Rather than assign data a fixed location on a hard drive, it uses algorithms to frequently reposition information, including the code that makes up the file system itself. It elegantly maximizes storage space, but it can also complicate data recovery when a computer crashes. If the algorithms are corrupted, the file system will be unable to locate its own position. All the data it organizes disappears into an indistinguishable mass of 0s and 1s. The contents of that hard drive will be irretrievably lost. In Reiser's case, a critical piece of data -- the location of Nina Reiser -- has gone missing. Alameda County prosecutors think there's an explanation for her disappearance; they blame Reiser, a computer expert with a penchant for violent videogames. The two had been separated for 27 months when she disappeared, and her body has not been found. It boils down to this: I may be awkward, a little weird, and prone to convoluted theories about nearly everything.
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