what program(s) will i need, for either windows 7 or ubuntu (i have both installed on my HDD), to install onto a SD card, and how big should the memory stick be for this? the ISO is about 230mb (rounded up) and the SD card i plan to use is 512mb.
You can't just dump an ISO to a disk device and expect it to still boot... A SD card is not a cdrom and can't be made to pretend to be one. The bootloader process is very different, the system init will be very different. Is it possible? Potentially, depending on the distro. But there's no "convert CD into bootable SD card" program and as I understand it won't be. Booting it from SD card probably means extracting it from the ISO and modifying the OS inside, and the instructions will be quite specific to the distro in question.
i must respectfully disagree.
the distro's official website says it can boot off of any media but no instructions are provided except for a liveCD and HDD installation.
Well, it's true. A CDROM isn't a hard drive. You can't boot an ISO from something that's not a cdrom. There's no general-purpose solution, since it involves getting the software to boot from a not-cdrom.
Yes, like I said: specific to the distro. Use the HDD installation instructions. A USB device will probably be detected as a hard drive.