I have found some interesting websites that set interesting problems to challenge your programming skills and as I have been messing round more with python I have decided to have a go at some of them using python.
A particularly interesting one is Project Euler where I have just achieved the award Decathlete for solving the first ten problems. I suspect the rest will be much harder.
Another challenging set of problems is at http://escape.alf.nu/ this guides you through some common pitfalls in javascript programming. The aim is to get the sample code to call alert(1).