Update 12/2/2013: System76 has acknowledged that the original keyboard was terrible and has sent every Galago owner a replacement keyboard for free (actually the second time they've done this - the original keyboard was apparently extremely flimsy, so they put a metal plate behind it - that was the revision that came with mine - and now they've redesigned the keyboard a third time.) This new keyboard is thousands of times better than the old one - I feel like a normal person and don't need to pound the keys to get all my keystrokes to register.

Furthermore, my comments below about the Killer wifi no longer apply - while my fix worked, it no longer appears to be necessary as of the Ubuntu 13.10 system upgrade.

The other outstanding issues are also all more or less fixed - the black screen on boot was fixed by a driver update, graphics performance is vastly improved as of 13.10 (and I've also realized that my previous test was on battery power and not plugged in) - and the battery life is a bit better as well (not dramatically so, but there's a noticeable increase.) So, I'm prepared to say all my gripes below are fixed. This is now a great laptop and I'm quite pleased with my purchase.

I do most of my work on desktop computers, and I haven't really had a decent laptop in a while. But I stumbled across an ad for System76's Galago UltraPro a little while ago and was intrigued - quad core Haswell processor, integrated graphics that are actually decent, lots of build-to-order configuration options, Ubuntu pre-installed, and a high resolution screen. I had tried using Ubuntu on my previous laptop (a truly awful HP machine purchased at a time when my only goal was to get a functional laptop for as cheap as possible) and it didn't play well with the hardware - the battery lasted about an hour at most and the thing got so hot it would nearly melt through my thighs whenever I used it, despite my many attempts to mess around with power-saving tweaks. So a custom-built Ubuntu laptop was appealing, because the OS and the hardware should work reasonably well together.

I added some custom options to the default configuration – an SSD for the system plus a 1TB storage drive – my music library is large – an extra 4GB of RAM, and a faster WiFi upgrade. (It seems to me that offering custom configurations is something that not that many vendors even offer any more, and I appreciate it as someone who likes to have significantly more storage space than would be typical relative to the other specs.) The machine arrived a week ago and I've been using it since then.

The Galago packs a full HD display with lots of desktop space and also apparently smells intriguing enough that my cat Boris feels the need to rub his face on it.

The Good

• The Display: better than I could have imagined – bright, high-contrast, beautiful colors, and the machine packs a full 1920x1080 pixels into a 14” screen for an extremely high pixel density. It's wonderful to look at, though I'll note that it approaches the threshold where small text gets a bit hard to read. I love the screen and all the space, but it's possible that it might give farsighted people headaches.
• Speed: I don't really do much that's super CPU-intensive, but that aside, the machine has felt quick and responsive for all the tasks I've given it. It boots up in about ten seconds (thanks to the SSD) and applications open immediately.

Needs Improvement

• Graphics Performance: I wasn't expecting anything amazing here given the lack of a discrete card, but System76's marketing materials led me to believe that the integrated Iris Pro graphics are a reasonable substitute. Maybe my expectations were set a bit too high, but I'm just frankly not that impressed – I downloaded Steam for Linux and tested out Double Fine's The Cave – not exactly Crysis – and even with a reduced resolution and medium settings things were still a bit jumpy and erratic at times. That said, I haven't done much gaming testing beyond that, so maybe it's just an issue with this particular game.
• Wifi: When I ordered the machine I opted for the upgraded Killer wifi. I got it working fine eventually, but it was misconfigured out of the box and it took a fair amount of frustration and googling to fix. (And I'm not the only one with this issue.) At first, it was highly unstable – the connection would drop every five minutes or so – and even when it was connected, the average speed was abysmal. If you're reading this and have the same problem, the solution is to create a file here:
  /etc/modprobe.d/ath9k.conf
  - with the text “options ath9k nohwcrypt=1 blink=1 btcoex_enable=1 enable_diversity=1”.
  (I don't actually know which of the above options is actually the one that makes it work, but it's definitely one of them.) This kind of thing isn't that big a deal, since it does work now, but part of the reason consumers go to a company like System76 is that the machine is supposed to just work – you're not supposed to need to screw around with this stuff. I'm sure they'll fix it for future machines, but it was a bit frustrating.
• Battery: lasts about as long as advertised (3.5 to 4 hours.) For a Haswell processor, it really ought to be better, but at least System76 doesn't inflate their statistics like so many others do. They say 3.5 to 4 hours and that seems to be what you get. Still, this is much longer than I'm used to (having not yet been spoiled by a 12-hour netbook) so I can't complain that much.
• Startup: while the thing does boot up very fast, it's a bit unreliable. Frequently (maybe 40-50% of the time) I don't actually get to the login screen and just see a black screen with a blinking cursor and a mouse pointer. I can ctrl-alt-f1 to a text terminal and try to manually start the display manager, but I just get error messages. So far, I haven't figured out a solution other than to just reboot until it works, and I don't know what's causing the problem. I'm sure it's just something misconfigured somewhere and that I'll find a fix eventually, but (again) it's the kind of thing that I shouldn't have to worry about in the first place.

The Bad

• The Keyboard: Oh dear. Just typing out this blog post is torture – I would say roughly 5% of the keys I hit don't actually register (despite typing REALLY REALLY HARD!), and I'm constantly looking back and seeing misspelled words and missing letters. Absolutely unacceptable. Fortunately, it seems that plenty of other people have complained about the same issue, and System76 is sending out replacement keyboards to anyone who asks (I put in a support request on Friday and haven't heard back yet but the Ubuntu Forums and Twitter tell me I should be fine.) I'm glad they've acknowledged the problem, but I'm a bit surprised they didn't notice this issue with the first batch.

The Verdict

This is a really nice machine marred by a handful of frustrating problems. In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have pre-ordered a machine with no reviews anywhere, and I suppose it's to be expected that a brand-new model might have some launch issues. The two most frustrating are the Wifi and the keyboard – and since I was able to fix the Wifi and have every reason to believe the replacement keyboard will be better, I'm still mostly satisfied with my purchase. However, for now I'd recommend that anyone eying this machine hold off for a couple of weeks until it's clear that the replacement keyboards are functional.

So this is a pretty silly post, but whatever - I had lots of fun doing it. Basically, I had "The Final Countdown" stuck in my head because I was excited about the new Arrested Development, and then it occurred to me "that guitar riff would make a really great fugue subject." So I went ahead and tried to do a fugue. It's been a while, so it it's a bit sloppy, there are probably a few voice-leading errors and parallel fifths, but it still sounds pretty good. So here you go - the FUGAL COUNTDOWN!

Sheet music here. Differs slightly from the video above - I'm fixing voice-leading errors as I find them.

President Obama's proposal to let the Bush tax cuts expire for married taxpayers making over $250,000 and single taxpayers making over $200,000 sounds simple enough. If you make under those amounts, nothing changes, and if you make more, you pay the old Clinton-era tax rates. Right?

As with anything related to the federal income tax code, things are much more complicated than they seem. For one thing, the Bush tax cuts included much more than just marginal rate reductions – they also changed the way dividend income is taxed, reduced capital gains tax rates, and phased out various limitations on exemptions and deductions for upper income taxpayers.  Additionally, marginal tax rates apply to taxable income, while Obama's thresholds apply to adjusted gross income (AGI). Finally, Obama first proposed those $200,000/$250,000 thresholds back in 2009; using the same numbers four years later in 2013 would cause this tax increase to affect significantly more taxpayers than initially intended because of inflation, and the official proposal in his 2013 budget indexes those thresholds using a 2009 base year. So when Obama talks about letting the Bush tax cuts expire for families earning over $250,000 and single filers earning over $200,000, he really means $267,000 and $213,600.

The marginal rate increases are relatively simple to understand, but it requires knowing the difference between taxable income and AGI. Taxable income is simply AGI minus personal exemptions ($3,900 per dependent in 2013 plus an additional $3,900 for the head of the household) and deductions (in 2013, a minimum of $6,100 for single filers and $12,200 for married filers, plus more if the taxpayer itemizes.) So for an AGI of $267,000 (remember, that's the $250,000 threshold adjusted for inflation to 2013), the applicable taxable income threshold is $267,000 - $12,200 – (2 x $3,900): that's subtracting the standard deduction for married filers and two personal exemptions (one for each spouse.) That comes out to $247,000.

Under current policy, there are six taxable income brackets – 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33%, and 35%. Obama's proposal would let part of the 33% tax bracket and all of the 35% tax bracket rise to Clinton-era tax rates: 36% and 39.6%[1][2]. The split in the 33% tax bracket (where the upper part goes up to 36%) is set to be the number calculated above: $247,000. (The same calculation for single filers comes out to $203,600). So the marginal tax rates on taxable income under each scenario are as follows:

Things get more complicated when you look at other aspects of the Bush tax cuts – capital gains and dividends, for example. Currently, capital gains are taxed at a top rate of 15%, whereas under Clinton they had been taxed at 20%. Obama proposes to tax capital gains at 20%, but only for taxpayers whose income is above his threshold. The way that works in practice is this: take the lesser of your taxable income over the applicable taxable income threshold and your total capital gains income, and that's the amount that is taxed at the higher rate. A family that has $257,000 in taxable income and $80,000 in capital gains is $10,000 over the $247,000 taxable income threshold. So $70,000 of those capital gains are taxed at 15%, and the remaining $10,000 are taxed at 20%.

It's similar for dividends. The Bush tax cuts created a new category of dividends referred to as "qualified" – so named because the qualify to be taxed as if they were capital gains rather than ordinary income. In order to qualify, a dividend needs to be paid by a US corporation and the stock needs to have been held for at least 60 days. Roughly three quarters of dividend income is qualified[3]. Obama proposes to let qualified dividends revert to being taxed at the ordinary rates – but only for taxpayers earning over the threshold. So qualified dividends are taxed at capital gains rates until the taxpayer's taxable income exceeds the threshold, and beyond that are taxed at ordinary rates. The exact amount that is taxed at the higher rate is, as with capital gains, the lesser of the taxpayer's taxable income over the threshold and his or her qualified dividend income.

One other change made by the Bush tax cuts was the gradual phase out of two provisions aimed at limiting the benefit of tax deductions for high income taxpayers. These are known as PEP, the Personal Exemption Phaseout, and Pease, named for Representative Don Pease, who proposed it. (For more on PEP and Pease and how they work, see Tax Foundation Special Report No. 178 – "PEP and Pease: Repealed for 2010 But Preparing a Comeback.") These provisions came with their own income thresholds because they were also targeted at upper-income taxpayers: if PEP were reinstated next year with no changes, it would affect single taxpayers with an AGI over $178,150 and married filers with an AGI over $267,200. Obama therefore proposes to bring back Pease, but to raise the threshold for single filers to $213,600 so as not to violate his pledge (again, that's $200,000 in 2009 dollars). He'd also leave the married threshold where it is (being ever so slightly above his magic number of $267,000.) PEP, too, is similar: if reinstated next year with no changes it would apply to filers with incomes over $178,150 regardless of filing status, so Obama would bring it back but raise the applicable thresholds to $213,600 for single filers and $267,000 for married filers.

(Cross posted from the Tax Foundation's Tax Policy Blog)

I've been re-listening to a lot of Mozart piano concertos recently, which are, along with his operas, his best work. I'm always a little bit surprised that stereotypical, "popular" Mozart consists, by and large, of music that is relatively boring and plain in comparison (things like Eine Kleine Nachtmusic and so forth - essentially composed as background music). Even most Mozart symphonies, except for the latest few, are pretty light and unremarkable. His piano concertos, by far, show the greatest depth, yet most of them (except for a handful of popular movements) are essentially unknown to the vast majority of people who aren't classical music nerds, and it's a real shame. When I tell people my favorite composer is Mozart, I can almost understand why they might think "Well, okay, but isn't he kind of boring?" Sure, if you've never actually heard his best work.

I think the main reason his piano concertos stand out is because he composed most of them for himself to play - they're much more personal works. They also gain a lot from their formal and structural requirements - the first movement is always in a modified sonata form specific to instrumental concertos, whereas a symphony or string quartet is usually in standard, unmodified sonata form. The main difference is that in a symphony, you simply hear the expository material played through twice, exactly the same; in a concerto, the orchestra plays an abbreviated exposition by itself, and the soloist doesn't enter until the second run through, in which new material is introduced and there's a sort of dialogue between the soloist and the orchestra - it all gives the piece a more elegant and melancholy character.

In my view, the hardest problem that a composer has to solve when writing music of any appreciable length is how to balance two contradictory goals: one, having enough variety to hold the audience's interest, and two, writing in such a way that all that variety still sounds like it belongs together in the same piece. Mozart's piano concertos are probably the most successful pieces of music ever written in that regard. Every Mozart concerto movement has an astonishing range of emotion and quantity of thematic material, which is true of many 19th century pieces as well, but Mozart's strength is to keep all of that range unified as part of what is clearly the same piece of music throughout. Lots of 19th century music sounds sort of "stitched together" - there's a lot of emotional range covered, but the music is constantly changing speeds and textures and so sounds inelegant. Not so with Mozart.

Here are a few of my favorites:

This is the first movement of No. 24 in C Minor. I think it shows, probably more than any other work could, the degree to which Ludwig van Beethoven didn't just simply burst onto the musical scene at the turn of the century and single-handedly change the course of music - there's a lot of precedent in Mozart for the direction he took. Who knows - if Mozart had lived past the age of 35, maybe he'd have out-Beethovened Beethoven.

Next is No. 25 in C Major:

This one has a sort of martial character to it. The main melodies are musically very simple, and I think the fact that Mozart was able to do so much with them is a testament to both his genius and the strength of the piano concerto as a genre. The "B" theme that is first introduced by the violins at 1:35 is a very simple idea, and it's a real joy to listen to Mozart build on it throughout the movement, particular its final formal statement much later during the recapitulation from 11:00 to 11:15 or so - who would think that such a basic melody could sound that inspiring?

Finally, here's one that you've probably heard before: 

This is probably the most boundlessly optimistic piece ever written. It's the 3rd movement of the 23rd concerto in A Major. To some extent, it's an exception to the idea of balancing variety and thematic unity as the key strength of the concerto, since it's so consistently happy throughout.  However, there's one particularly beautiful passage from 5:30 to around 5:50 which I think is a perfect example of this - listen to how effortlessly Mozart slides from a relatively melancholy section back into the optimistic mood that characterizes the rest of the piece.