  We present a universal scheme of pulsed operations for the IBM
oscillator-stabilized flux qubit comprising the CPHASE gate, single-qubit
preparations and measurements. Based on numerical simulations, we argue that
the error rates for these operations can be as low as about .5% and that noise
is highly biased, with phase errors being stronger than all other types of
errors by a factor of nearly 10^3. In contrast, the design of a CNOT gate for
this system with an error rate of less than about 1.2% seems extremely
challenging. We propose a special encoding which exploits the noise bias
allowing us to implement a logical CNOT gate where phase errors and all other
types of errors have nearly balanced rates of about .4%. Our results illustrate
how the design of an encoding scheme can be adjusted and optimized according to
the available physical operations and the particular noise characteristics of
experimental devices.
