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 see you’re a man with ideals. I guess I better be going while you’ve still got them.”
—Mae West, U.S. screenwriter, W.C. Fields, and Edward Cline. Flower Belle Lee (Mae West)
“It appeared that he had once represented his tribe at Augusta, and also once at Washington, where he had met some Western chiefs. He had been consulted at Augusta, and gave advice, which he said was followed, respecting the eastern boundary of Maine, as determined by highlands and streams, at the time of the difficulties on that side. He was employed with the surveyors on the line. Also he called on Daniel Webster in Boston, at the time of his Bunker Hill oration.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For some people, their idea of getting tough is longer suspended sentences.”
—Jeremy Larner, U.S. screenwriter. Senator Crocker Jarman (Don Porter)