Is there any way to randomly generate a set of positive numbers such that they have a desired mean and standard deviation?
I have an algorithm to generate numbers with a gaussian distribution, but I don't know how to deal with negative numbers in a way the preserves the mean and standard deviation.
It looks like a poisson distribution might be a good approximation, but it takes only a mean.
EDIT: There's been some confusion in the responses so I'll try to clarify.
I have a set of numbers that give me a mean and a standard deviation. I would like to generate an equally sized set of numbers with an equivalent mean and standard deviation. Normally, I would use a gaussian distribution to do this, however in this case I have an additional constraint that all values must be greater than zero.
The algorithm I'm looking for doesn't need to be gaussian-based (judging by the comments so far, it probably shouldn't be) and doesn't need to be perfect. It doesn't matter if the resulting number set has a slightly different mean/standard deviation -- I just want something that will usually be in the ballpark.