Problem connecting with PHP 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.

Since the instructions I'm working off uses PHP 2.4.2 and PostgreSQL
7.2 and I'm using PHP 2.4.2 and PostgreSQL 7.3 I figured that the
different version of PostgreSQL gives me a good place to start looking
and as such I'm posting to this list rather than the PHP list.

Does anyone have any idea why host=localhost is breaking my connection?
Is there a configuration value I should be setting?

Thanks,

Eric Marsh