hairball

n. 1. [Fidonet] A large batch of messages that a store-and-forward network
is failing to forward when it should. Often used in the phrase Fido coughed
up a hairball today , meaning that the stuck messages have just come
unstuck, producing a flood of mail where there had previously been drought.
2. An unmanageably huge mass of source code. JWZ thought the Mozilla effort
bogged down because the code was a huge hairball. 3. Any large amount of
garbage coming out suddenly. Sendmail is coughing up a hairball, so expect
some slowness accessing the Internet.

