Lee Daniel Crocker (born in Valdosta, Georgia on July 3, 1963) is an American computer programmer and poker player. He is best known for rewriting the software upon which Wikipedia runs to address scalability problems. This new software, originally known as "Phase III", went live in July 2002 and became the foundation of what is now called MediaWiki. Today, MediaWiki's Subversion code repository is still named "phase3".
He was involved in the creation of the GIF, JPEG, and PNG image file formats, and appears as a co-author of the PNG specification. He invented the per-scanline variable pre-filtering compression method used by PNG, the sum-of-abs heuristic used by many encoding programs, and proposed an early version of the Adam7 algorithm, using 5 passes rather than 7.
In June 2010, Crocker and others won the USENIX Advanced Computing Technical Association STUG award for contributions to the Wikipedia software.
Read more about Lee Daniel Crocker: Crocker's Rules
Famous quotes containing the words lee, daniel and/or crocker:
“I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.... Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
—Harper Lee (b. 1926)
“When winter snows upon thy sable hairs,
And frost of age hath nipped thy beauties near;
When dark shall seem thy day that never clears,
And all lies withered that was held so dear,
Then take this picture which I here present thee,
Limned with a pencil not all unworthy;”
—Samuel Daniel (1562–1619)
“For some people, their idea of getting tough is longer suspended sentences.”
—Jeremy Larner, U.S. screenwriter. Senator Crocker Jarman (Don Porter)