Problem connecting with PostgreSQL in OS X

Good Morning, I've got a J2EE program I've been working on for some time that has been connected to a FrontBase DBMS. Well as a result of my spending some time exploring the open source world I've decided to to change database to PostgreSQL. I'm developing on Mac OS X and found a page on the Apple website describing how to set up PostgreSQL and then how to connect to it. I built and installed PostgreSQL and performed a couple simple operations to confirm that its working properly. Next, to simplify administration I followed the instructions to install PHP and phpPgAdmin. Using the simple example script I was able to connect to the database with PHP. When I tried to use phpPgAdmin I was getting fail to login errors. Poking around the PHP code I discovered that if I commented out a line that added "host=localhost" I was able to connect. Does anyone have any idea why host=localhost is breaking my connection? Is there a configuration value I should be setting? Thanks, Eric Marsh