I don’t know if this has been publicized yet, but a quick google doesn’t show much up about it. I was checking out Amazon’s Mechanical Turk the other day, and it give a Django error page due to an unhandled URL. Interesting.
Amazon's Mechanical Turk showing a Django Error Page
Update: I stand corrected. Seems Amazon MT just embeds other sites’ pages in its page, so this is an error from a third-party host.
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Tags: amazon, Development, django, errors, mechanical turk, python, web applications, webapps, webdev, websites
And they run it with DEBUG=True?!
Yep, it looks that way
I haven’t tried again in case they just happened to be debugging the live site at the time for some reason though.
I think what you might be seeing is a django site being used as the source for the turk form – you can iframe those in if you don’t want to use Amazon’s form generators – rather than the entire backend of MT being a Django app.
Derek, yes, it’s certainly not throwing a django error for the main page. Then again, django is doing the URL dispatch to a PHP page, so it seems like Django IS the main webapp in use, with a few more static pages in php. Or, perhaps, that Django is in use now, whereas php was previously used for some things, and the link is just out of date.
Perhaps it’s more complex, with Django used as a URL dispatcher for just a subset of pages, but that would be a strange setup, so I think it’s probably best to apply Occam’s Razor for now, and assume Django is doing most of the work.
I think what Derek is referring to is that Mechanical Turk is merely a broker between an organization needing a task done and a participant performing the task. What you’re seeing is an error generated by the organization at the other end (not Amazon). Just take a look at the URLconf displayed there. Games and comics don’t really seem like they belong on Amazon’s service, so it’s almost certainly being generated by the party on the other end.
All Amazon is doing is showing you the page the other organization specified in the task. If that page uses Django, and is erroring out, it certainly looks like it’s part of the Amazon interface, but isn’t. So, in this case, Occam’s Razor would suggest that Amazon isn’t using Django at all, but just playing middle-man between you and a broken site.
The IP address in the error message (67.207.140.43) is owned by slicehost.com. They are a nice virtual server host, but I doubt Amazon uses them to run their infrastructure.
This is likely as Derek describes: a Turk HIT that is hosted in an iframe on another site. Not Amazon’s Turk system itself.
And if you go to http://67.207.140.43 directly, you will find the site itself.
If you got to that IP address, you get the page for EMLPrime. It looks like they wrote the app that utilizes Mechanical Turk, and it’s their error. /us/peter/ is also a pretty good indicator that you’re not dealing with Amazon code…
There is no Django running on this page that belongs to Amazon. Instead, it looks like someone changed their site or IP and the URL that was provided to show the form is no longer valid.
Derek’s actually right on. You can iframe in pages from your personal site to use as forms in your MT workflow. So, what you’re seeing is the error from the HIT owner’s site simply being shown in an iframe.
Wow Django and Amazon..
Great!