User:Lee Daniel Crocker
I am a computer programmer, poker player, amateur philosopher (specifically a devotee of Karl Popper), and a dilettante at just about everything else. I am Wikipedia user #43. My major accomplishment here is that I was the initial author of the current MediaWiki software, though like many free software projects it has grown far beyond my initial code. Magnus, Brion, Tim and I won the Usenix STUG award for that. I recently retired from my job as embedded systems engineer at Ansync Labs. I spend most of my online time on Facebook [1].
I am not a lawyer. I have studied the law and follow intellectual property law in particular as an involved citizen, and have strong opinions about it (as I do about everything else). Indeed, those opinions are a major reason for my involvement here. I often express those opinions here, as is my right under the first amendment. These opinions should not be construed as legal advice; you rely on my interpretations of the law at your own peril. If you want a definitive legal opinion, you should seek the advice of a licensed professional (most of whom will probably know less about the issue than I do, but who will have lobbied for laws protecting their monopoly and requiring me to post silly disclaimers like this).
I am skeptical of the value of copyrights and patents (and intellectual property law in general, except perhaps for trademarks). In particular, "All creative works or inventions original to me, Lee Daniel Crocker, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used in whole or in part for any purpose without permission or notification." I do ask that you not claim to have created anything that I created, but most legal systems mistakenly treat attribution as an intellectual property right, so I cannot legally enforce this without claiming a copyright.
Biographical stuff
There is a recurring argument over whether I merit an actual Wikipedia bio or not, and a very strong taboo here against editing one's own bio. So here are some biographical details that someone might want to put into my bio if they feel like it, only some of which have citable printed references:
I was born in
.I first started using computers in the late 70s (yes,
I have been an active participant in the Free software movement since 1988. One early project was adding features to Fractint, an MS-DOS-based program for producing fractal graphics, which still exists. My own recollection is that I'm the one who suggested the name "Stone Soup Group" for its authors, but I don't have any evidence of that. Like many Fractint authors, I was active on CompuServe, a popular commercial online service at the time, when Internet access was restricted mostly to academics, the military, and a few hobbyists. I participated in discussions there on the creation of the GIF graphics format. I also attended the meeting at C-Cube Microsystems in
I was employed for a brief and unproductive year at Microsoft, where I was working as a QA for Windows NT 3.1. My experience at Microsoft likely added to my enthusiasm as a free software advocate, and I have had a Microsoft-free home since 1996. I also do my best to avoid the other members of the free-software/free-culture axis of evil,
In 1995, I was among the group of engineers creating the new PNG image file format. I created the line-by-line adaptive filtering compression method and the "sum-of-abs" heuristic method commonly used by programs writing PNG files. I appear as a co-author of RFC 2083. I had a brief involvement with the
Along with being a free software advocate, I have long been an advocate of copyright reform. David Brin mentions me briefly in this context in The Transparent Society, but there he also attributes to me opinions which I don't recall holding. A statement releasing all my creative works to the public domain has long been part of my email signature. Philosophically I am a
In 2001, I became an early user of Nupedia, and then Wikipedia, initially creating many of the articles related to Poker, my primary hobby at the time. When the rapid increase in popularity led to scalability problems with the software being used for the site (written by German student Magnus Manske), I redesigned the database schema and wrote a new PHP codebase from scratch to be more efficient, though I copied the visual design and many ideas from Magnus's code. I added many new features such as a new media system for images and sounds, user emails, and a simplified language-translation system. After the software had been running on my piclab.com server for a while and tested by the community, I installed the software on what was then Wikipedia's single server, named "pliny" after
In 2003, I left my 20-year-plus computer programming career to earn my living at the poker table. I worked for 10 years at the Phoenix Casino in Sacramento, CA. In 2013 I went back to the keyboard working for Ansync Labs. I retired in February 2023.
Created pages
It seems to be a tradition here to list pages one has created or edited. I've long since lost track of how many pages I've edited, and many of the pages I created or overhauled no longer bear any resemblance to my original text. Also, many of my pages no longer list me in their history because I edited them in the early days of Wikipedia when edit histories were periodically deleted. But to give some sense of what I'm interested in and what my style of writing is, I list below a few pages which still contain a majority of their text written by me:
Prisoner's dilemma - Milgram experiment - Critical philosophy -
Intellectual property - Copyright - Patent - Trademark (and some related pages like
ASCII - Code - Character - Character encoding -
Cooking - Bourbon - Cocktail - Bloody Mary -
The Original Barnstar |
The Chess Barnstar |
This user has been editing Wikipedia for more than twenty years. |