Geekiness at issue in Hans Reiser trial

OAKLAND, Calif.--There are stereotypical nerds...and then there is Hans Reiser. He's in a class all by himself, or at least that's how he was being portrayed here Monday in his first day on the stand in his own murder trial.

Between getting him to talk about the game he created at age 17 to compete with Dungeons and Dragons, to highlighting his interest in Russian mail-order brides, to having him explain a Linux kernel to a jury of laypeople, Reiser's attorney is laying his client's geekiness on thick.

Hans Reiser

(Credit: via Stanford University)

Reiser, 44, the founder of the ReiserFS file system software available for Linux, is accused of murdering his estranged wife, Nina, whose body has never been found. Experts for the prosecution have presented biological and trace evidence tying Reiser to Nina's death. But Reiser has long suggested that his wife might not be dead at all, but could be hiding in her native Russia after stealing money from her husband's former company Namesys.

As in his earlier testimony Monday at the Alameda County Superior Court, defense attorney William Du Bois seemed to be making a special effort to present his client as the computer wonk he clearly is. Du Bois flashed back to Reiser's days at U.C. Berkeley where he spent years in Evans Hall playing computer games and watching his compadres hack into the university's computer system. "I wasn't the cracker, but my friends were."

The idea for Reiser's file system first came to him around 1984, he said, and he developed the idea until about 1993, he testified. At that point, Reiser was working as a system administrator at IBM's Almaden Research Center and he brought his idea to some computer scientists there. It didn't go over well, he said. "One of the researchers fell asleep during my talk."

After reading an article about computer programmers hungry for work in Russia, Reiser then hired a Russian team to work on his file system. It didn't hurt that "the women in Russia were beautiful," said Reiser, who also decided to visit some agencies there he said were for "mail-order brides."

The Russian programming team eventually quit, perhaps out of frustration with Reiser's management style, he said. "They didn't like my telling them how to write code," Reiser said. That's when Reiser renamed his file system ReiserFS so his contribution to it would always be known, he said.

ReiserFS was eventually accepted into Linux around 2000, he testified. Reiser later corrected his attorney's pronunciation of the OS named for Linus Torvalds.

Du Bois alluded to Reiser's nerdy tendencies as he drew out his client's account of meeting Nina at one of the agencies in Russia. Nina, unlike others, wanted to talk to him on the phone first before meeting him. "She actually heard you talk before she agreed to see you?" Du Bois asked Reiser. "And she still agreed to see you?"

The two of them only met a few times before agreeing Nina would come to the states on a tourist visa, Reiser said. Months after she arrived she got pregnant and they were married, Reiser said.

While he talked Nina as "perceptive," "beautiful" and "a step above all the other ladies I dated," Reiser agreed with his attorney's labeling of the marriage as "one of convenience."

[rdupuy11]

Russian women

Believe me, I am not one to complain about small injustices in the world, so, especially in context of a trial about murder, I'm not going to go overboard in criticizing the term 'mail order brides.'<br /><br />Rather, I'd just like to casually mention the subject for a bit. The term 'mail order bride', doesn't refer to 'mail order' or to 'brides'.<br /><br />It's a term to explain Russian-American marriages, and it's, as you might guess pejorative.<br /><br />In point of fact, one should not use the term, unless your point is to offend Russian-American marriages.<br /><br />Now, the truth is the governmnet is no better...they define all marriages between a Russian and American as 'mail order', if the only way to explain a marriage is a service like eHarmony.com, or another one was used.<br /><br />I had a profile on a popular dating service, and a woman in England wrote me a few times....little did I know she enjoyed my profile a lot, she was married, she was interested in me, but not for marriage, she actually wanted to introduce me to her neice!<br /><br />Strange story I know, but, I accepted the introduction and her neice and I, we do have a 9 year age difference, but we really hit it off, and we got married.<br /><br />So then I found out the government said my bride was 'mail order'. OK, whatever...governments opinion amount to nothing.<br /><br />peace

[rdupuy11]

clarification

of course I said the term had nothing to do with 'mail order' or 'bride'...because 1) mail, mail has nothing to do with it, 2)order, there is no order, and 3) while my profile, the husband, was on a dating service, my wife's was never on one.<br /><br />So, this 'mail order bride' is a man, I guess...anyway, we are married over 5 years now, and very happy, and I recommend if you find love, don't care what anyone says.

[LostMyBeaver]

Does CNet employ editors?

It's not often that I find the quality if editing to be so poor on a professional news site that I feel obligated to complain. I am aware that my spelling and grammar are poor, however I can definately tell when an article has not been edited.<br /><br />Please Cnet, go back, read this article and correct it. Next, try to massage it into a news story. This is a story of interest and importance, it's a shame that I feel it was translated to English using Babelfish.

[Kyle-A-Christopherson]

The Headline is Clearer than the Story

What was the point of writing this? The Story looks more like an incomplete profile on the Defendant than a serious news article. It rambles all over the place and doesn't seem to have a conclusion. I too would appreciate more editorial over site from Cnet.com This one just wasn't up to snuff.

[galacticlove]

Russian Women are NOT Mail Order Brides

You might as well start calling Black people by the "N" Word if you want to use "Mail Order Brides" to label women whom I find be general head and shoulders above their Western counterparts.<br /><br />I live in Siberia.. And the vast numbers of Russian Women out there are proud, cultivated, reserved and beautiful.<br /><br />Anyway one who use the MOB label sounds like an ignorant person or worse.. a jealous feminist who can't handle competition. <br /><br />There's an article that goes into detail on this very subject. <br /><br /><a class="jive-link-external" href="http://russianwomen.wordpress.com/2007/01/17/why-feminism-promotes-%e2%80%9cmail-order-brides%e2%80%9d/" target="_newWindow">http://russianwomen.wordpress.com/2007/01/17/why-feminism-promotes-%e2%80%9cmail-order-brides%e2%80%9d/</a><br /><br />Please do us all a favor and retract the MOB term or issue an apology..<br /><br />GL

[galacticlove]

previous typo.. sorry

"whom I find to be in general head and shoulders above their Western counterparts."