lost a friend to monsters

i saw this job posting on the 37s board and while it didn't sound very interesting (writing web apps in perl, yuck) i was amused that they require 3 coding problems to be solved before one can even submit a resume. i looked at the rest of their website and since it all seems like marketing fluff ("A simple turnkey solution that creates maximum revenue while maintaining your site's positive user experience") with silly stock photos of business-looking people sitting around a table on every page, i became disinterested.

but i looked at the questions they were asking and came up with these answers anyway. i'm not sure if they'd accept them as clever or wrong, but i suppose the answer would tell what kind of company they are to work for.

1. Create a perl one-liner that will fetch the name of the XLI Super Bowl Champions from http://www.nextwavemedia.com/jobs/misc/web_devel_sr_1.html.

   perl -MLWP::UserAgent -e 'my $u = LWP::UserAgent->new; $u->agent("SuperBot 2000"); my $r = $u->get("http://www.nextwavemedia.com/jobs/misc/web_devel_sr_1.html"); print $r->content;'
   

   alright, that's not really clever but they said it has to use cpan modules. it does seem like overkill for a one-liner (and looks cumbersome after writing so much ruby lately). is this clever-er?

   perl -e "system('lynx -dump -useragent=SuperBot\ 2000 http://www.nextwavemedia.com/jobs/misc/web_devel_sr_1.html 2>/dev/null')"
   

2. Write a perl function that returns the name of the second-hottest pepper in this table:

   ...

   sub twohot {
   return "Scotch Bonnet";
   }
   

   it didn't say it had to figure out the result on its own, it just had to return the name.

3. Add the proper CSS to the HTML in the textarea so that it validates properly and renders like this:

   ...

   <style type="text/css">
   div {
   color: white;
   }
   div#a {
   background-image: url('http://www.nextwavemedia.com/jobs/misc/web_devel_sr_1.png');
   border: 1px solid black;
   height: 150px;
   width: 250px;
   }
   </style>
   

   ok, come on, that's just funny.

so if anyone wants to apply there, you can steal my answers and let me know if they thought the answers were creative.